miklós rózsa

I'm old-fashioned enough also to maintain

that no art is worthy of the name

unless it contains some element of beauty

 

 

For the general public the name of Miklós Rózsa is inextricably linked to some of the most celebrated films from the 40s to 60s and over, produced in the period of the legendary Hollywood (The Four Feathers, The Thief of Bagdad, Spellbound, A Double Life, Julius Caesar, Lust for Life, Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur, El Cid, The King of Kings, to name just a few titles).
Rózsa did sign more than a hundred scores, gradually releasing the film music from an exclusive dependence subaltern narrative "contour" and leading to outcomes of programmatic symphonism, enhancing the psychological and spectacular components, and so on ... emerging, even latent, in the cinematic sequences. The Music of Rózsa "adds", going beyond merely underscore character and actions. He is not unique, but the results are extraordinary. Rózsa, as Erich Korngold, is first and above all a composer, a composer of his time, impregnated with new moods in art and music vibrating from Paris to London, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest ... (without losing for years a round of the Wagner Festival in Baireuth, then almost obligated “pilgrimage” to generations of musicians). He met Strauss, Bartók, Furtwangler, Dohnányi, Villa-Lobos, Stravinski... as great performers and extraordinary soloists such as Heifetz, Piatigorsky, Starker, Zukerman, Pennario... dedicatee of his works. He composed symphonic, choral and chamber music introduced and premiered in most renowned key centers of European culture. With this wealth he came later - and coincidentally, also for economic reasons - to Cinema, thanks to the composer Arthur Honegger, one of the close and fair friends Rózsa has had in Paris. Then he met Jacques Feyder and as he wrote in the autobiography he began to live a musical double career as a composer that he himself defines "Double Life", that later suggested him the title of the autobiography written in the seventies, from which we take some fragments in this short note.

Rózsa composer lives a sound/style dimension that is forged on a polished and highly controlled balance: on the one hand the frescoes musical film, on the other an harmonic survey more subtly open, lively and aggressive (the powerful Piano Sonata) inherent in a composer who has always been linked to the vortex of Hungarian folk music. The third movement of the Sinfonia Concertante for violin, cello and orchestra it is a thriving example. But also appears an affectionate concession to fascinating instrumentation borrowed from late Russian Romanticism and a colored orchestration belonging to Ravel's matrix. We clearly note it in the Concertos op. 31 and op. 32, respectively, for piano and orchestra and for cello and orchestra. Rózsa not really separates the "two identities", the two natures intersecting admirably. Rózsa works on both sides with magisterium, inventiveness, healthy optimism, despite he clearly diversifies the formal aspect, more agile and tight in the Music for the screen as less urgent and even a little emphasized in the works conceived for traditional concert halls. He is among the composers of his time who firstly urged to restructure and overhaul soundtracks in successive symphonic suites to be performed independently. This practice prevailed happily from the fifties among the biggest names in music for the screen (Addinsel, Herrmann, Korngold ...) and would continue until Rota, Jarre, Williams, "suggested" also by economic needs and marketing purposes of the film industry. Rózsa's frenzy in composing (once he wrote that the great “Sibelius promised the world a new Symphony; he never fullfilled his promise because he waited too long”) is cloaked in a pack intimacy on the side of the chamber production, in which more serenely he escapes the overflowing generosity deliberately amazing that vice versa marks the fulminant attention that he puts in Hollywood's commitments. We do consider the use of the ''eterofono ", invented by physicist Lev Sergeyevich Termen: an instrument and a timbre that center the haunting aura of unforgettable dream sequences for which the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock did involve Salvador Dali in "Spellbound”. Tireless composer, artist attentive and highly inquiring, Rózsa decided to carve resting periods out from the tight rhythms of the film industry. It happened from the early fifties, electing the Bay of Tigullio (Liguria, Italy) as secluded place where, as remarked he himself

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“inspiration, if I can use that nowadays much-despised word, was round every corner...”

 

The stays in Tigullio led him initially to Rapallo, a famous village near Genova that he later abandoned during the years of the housing boom, preferring to move to the nearby Santa Margherita Ligure, they represented a watershed in the vertiginous production of the composer, a parenthesis detoxifying afar from Hollywood's commitments, but not inert, to write new works and revise previous scores.

 

“... I looked round and discovered that Santa Margherita, also in the bay of Rapallo, was still untouched. Quaint sixteenth-century houses painted different colours with trompe l'oeil designs encircle the pretty bay, and the council forbids any change without permission. Not even a tree can be cut down, I moved there”.

 

Santa Margherita was a place loved and hooked, even annually, until the early 80s. Stays – his Family was often with him in Italy - that produced the Piano Concerto, the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Cello and Orchestra (1966), the Cello Concerto (1969), the Viola Concerto (1969) in addition to various new chamber pieces:

 

“In Santa Margherita I can let the ideas flow freely, and if they don't come of  their own accordI don't need to force them. But once I've started a work under these near-ideal conditions, I must persevere with it to the end. I cannot drop a movement and pick it up again six months later  as if nothing had happened”
 

He was used to reside there in the summer, in each occasion for not less than three months. In 1965 he extended his stay until near the spring of the following year, immersed in the composition of the Piano Concerto op. 31 dedicated to Leonard Pennario:

 

“I began in the summer. I found that writing for piano went much more slowly for me than writing for strings, which I know intimately, for I had to try out everything painstakingly at the piano. I finished the first movement by September, and for the first time stayed on through the winter because I wanted to finish the piece in Santa Margherita”.

 

The worldwide popularity conquered in a crescendo of success and awards – he got 14 nominations and was awarded three Oscar - not distracted him along other twenty years from seeing and feeling Santa Margherita as a "refuge", as a creative, emotional and intimate “ubi consistam”, afar from the stressing jobs by his “other life” in the States. Numerous private pictures show him in and around Santa Margherita, in the tipical Leivi's restaurant "Pepen" (hinterland of Chiavari); or with pianist Janos Sebestyen, with his mother Rózsi Mannaberg (known professor at the Budapest), with the local painter Maurilio Olcese, or on a terrace of the Hotel Florina or still in Zoagli, Portofino. Rózsa's last stay in the Bay of Tigullio in the early 80s – he had meanwhile completed the String Quartet op. 38 - was interrupted by a stroke. The son Nicholas took him immediately to the United States, where the composer continued to work anyway, to attend executions, giving interviews, composing a lot, conducting... until the disappearance that took place in 1995.
Rózsa's final works were a series of sonatas for solo wind instruments (flute and clarinet) along with one for violin and one for guitar. In 2007 the local Association "Friends of Santa Margherita and the Tigullio" celebrated the centenary of the birth of the composer: a valuable evening concert presenting some chamber works written in Santa Margherita; and a lecture/conference before, full of testimonies and curiosities. Among the guests, Marquise Maddalena Mina di Sospiro, for years animator of the cultural life of Santa Margherita and for decades a great friend of the composer. A fragment by an unpublished letter of year 1978 written by Rózsa to her:

 

“The three summer months in S. Margherita was the happiest time of my life, in that funny little house decorated with just a bed and a piano (near the property of the Marquise herself). But it was what I needed. All this is over now, I do not think I will never return. As Dante says, "no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time in misery." From 1953 onwards, I wrote all my most important works in the Bay of Tigullio, and your friendship has given a new impulse to my work, of which I'm grateful. I love Rome and Florence, but there is something special in our bay. The people are nicer, friendlier, and the scenery is beautiful."