28 Facts About Miklos Rozsa

Miklos Rozsa was a Hungarian-American composer trained in Germany and active in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with extensive sojourns in Italy from 1953 onward.

The latter project brought him to Hollywood when production was transferred from wartime Britain, and Miklos Rozsa remained in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1946.

Miklos Rozsa was born in Budapest and was introduced to classical and folk music by his mother, Regina, a pianist who had studied with pupils of Franz Liszt, and his father, Gyula, a well-to-do industrialist and landowner who loved Hungarian folk music.

Gyula Miklos Rozsa had inherited from his father a Budapest shoe factory, which brought him to the capital around 1900.

Miklos Rozsa's only sibling, Edith, was born seven years later.

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Miklos Rozsa collected folksongs from the area where his family had a country estate north of Budapest in an area inhabited by the Paloc Hungarians.

Miklos Rozsa enrolled at the University of Leipzig in 1925, ostensibly to study chemistry at the behest of his practical-minded father.

Miklos Rozsa studied choral music with Karl Straube at the Thomaskirche, where Johann Sebastian Bach had once been the kapellmeister.

Miklos Rozsa emerged from these years with a deep respect for the German musical tradition, which would always temper the Hungarian nationalism of his musical style.

Miklos Rozsa suppressed both works, but eventually allowed the Symphony to be recorded in 1993.

Miklos Rozsa was introduced to film music in 1934 by his friend, the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger.

Miklos Rozsa went to see it and was greatly impressed by the opportunities the film medium offered.

Miklos Rozsa joined the staff of Korda's London Films, and scored the studio's epic The Four Feathers .

In 1943, now associated with Paramount, Miklos Rozsa scored the first of several collaborations with director Billy Wilder, Five Graves to Cairo.

In 1944, Miklos Rozsa was hired by producer David O Selznick to compose the score for Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound.

Miklos Rozsa's pioneering use of the theremin contributed to the effect, and the attention it generated likely influenced his Academy Award nomination.

Miklos Rozsa eventually arranged his themes as the Spellbound Concerto, which has enjoyed lasting success in concerts and recordings.

Miklos Rozsa enjoyed a fruitful three-film collaboration with the independent producer Mark Hellinger.

Miklos Rozsa later compiled a six-movement suite of music from these three films in tribute to the producer.

Miklos Rozsa received his second Oscar for A Double Life, in which Ronald Colman, as a Shakespearean actor playing Othello, becomes murderously disturbed in his offstage life.

Miklos Rozsa later adopted the title for his own memoir, signifying his desire to keep his personal music distinct from his movie career.

Also in 1947, Miklos Rozsa scored the music for the psychological thriller The Red House.

In 1948 Rozsa signed his only long-term studio contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer .

Miklos Rozsa was able to stipulate time off for his "serious" or personal composing, the right to decline assignments, and the right to teach a course on film music at the University of Southern California.

Miklos Rozsa later cited Resnais as one of the few directors in his experience who really understood the function of music in film.

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Miklos Rozsa returned to California at the behest of his son, and remained sequestered at his home for the remainder of his life.

Miklos Rozsa later adapted portions of this work for the score of Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes .

Miklos Rozsa's collaboration with conductor Maurice Skones and The Choir of the West at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, resulted in a commercial recording of his sacred choral works—To Everything There is a Season, Op.