Notes on Film Music

......by Jeffrey Dane - © 2001 Jeffrey Dane

Ever since original music was first written for films, the art of composing for the screen - the methods of scoring, the size and nature of the ensembles used, and the very character of the music - has altered almost as much as the movies themselves. The passage of time brings changes. Child prodigies, for example, don't retain that status forever: children have a tendency to grow up, and prodigies (if they are lucky) may become more prodigious.

The music written for many of the films through the 1970s is as different from some of today's scores as were the "special effects" in the earliest "flickers" from those seen in the film Jurassic Park (MCA/Universal, 1993), and in almost as many ways as there are technicians on a movie set.

The composition of music is in itself a highly specialized art form, and the music written for films often assumes a character all its own. Those who wrote for the screen during the Golden Age of composers in Hollywood were confronted by special needs and several objectives which they tried to meet in their music. Among the most important was to compose a score that would reinforce the action in the film, while at the same time weave a tonal fabric with thematic threads that would render a musical continuity to the entire tonal tapestry. (The word score, itself, fittingly corresponds to the number of staves - twenty - with which symphony-size manuscript paper is often printed).

The music written for films is frequently and almost customarily derided simply because it's been fashionable to do so, and the sheer beauty and excitement of the finest scores seem to conveniently escape the consideration (or, worse, the attention altogether) of those who scorn it. Most of those who wrote important music for films were thoroughly trained musicians and composers long before they even thought of ever setting foot in a film studio.

Left: Miklos Rozsa (right) ith John Don Williams and André Previn (center). ca 1960
Right Dr. Rozsa consulting with Ramón Menendez Pidál

Music by Miklos Rozsa

In his book, "Music for the Movies," the late film historian Tony Thomas wrote that when the roster of 20th-century composers in Hollywood is compiled, the name of Miklos Rozsa will be very near the top. Tony Thomas wasn't clairvoyant but he didn't have to be: he merely confirmed what many of us already know.

Miklos Rozsa was a composer who excelled perhaps more than any other in investing his scores with an unmistakable cohesion and homogeneity, retaining a distinctive musical integrity usually unmatched by the work of most of his Hollywood colleagues.

With his music for Ben Hur (MGM,1959), Rozsa created a veritable classic in film scores. The opening passages are vital to the film's atmosphere. They're responsible in large measure for creating the mood of the entire feature (three hours and 28 minutes long in its original-release form), and they make the viewer aware they're about to experience something significant.

The prologue, a filmic representation of the Adoration of the Magi, concludes with the sound of a shepherd's horn as the Star of Bethlehem disappears into the night sky. A sudden strong but gradual build-up is heard from the brass and then briefly sustained on a chord as "A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Production" appears on the screen in gold Roman lettering. As the music continues to ascend with a crescendo of brass fanfare, a cymbal crash and final chord of the opening motif is heard, and the main title "Ben Hur" appears on the screen against a magnificent backdrop of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco, The Creation of Adam.

Michelangelo's fresco, The Creation of Adam

"The single best performance I've seen in any movie" is how filmologist Don Miller described Frank Faylen's minor role but memorable portrayal of the sadistic nurse in The Lost Weekend. One can comfortably and suitably clothe his remark in musical garb: Ben Hur's "Magi" sequence is graced with what may be the most touchingly moving "Nativity" music heard in any film. Since our reactions are by nature personal we can speak only for ourselves, not for others, but that passage in the film gives new significance to the concept of inspiring and affectingly beautiful music, even without the visuals. Rozsa felt Bach would approve, and it seems he pulled out all the stops for this music. Rozsa had chutzpah, the slang Yiddish word for audacity: he also pulled the wool over the studio's eyes, thereby discrediting his "superiors" by implication, when he suggested composing music of his own, rather than complying with the idiotic request to use the anacronistic Adeste Fideles. The studio disregarded that notion when Rozsa threatened to leave the picture, and that his own music in fact postdates the medieval Latin hymn seemed to escape everyone's attention.

Christ's birth was an event which in retrospect was ultimately unique in the world's history. The historical consequences of what happened then are now a matter of historical record. No-one like the rabbi from Nazareth had ever lived before, and music accompanying a cinematic depiction of the advent of that occurrence should be unique as well, in keeping with the singularity - and the ultimate magnitude - of the circumstances. Rozsa had the right idea, it would appear.

The music is dramatic and inspiring and carries the viewer through the film's entire prelude, supports the remaining opening credits, and quietly modulates into the movie's first scene. Rarely has so much stirring and descriptive musical material been poured into a mere introduction to a film. To evoke so much feeling in such a relatively short musical passage has its own intrinsic difficulties, but Rozsa succeeded with Ben Hur and the results of his efforts on this score earned him his third Academy Award.

The general paradoxes of the film colony extend even to musical matters in particular. By various legal strictures and other problems, at the time of the film's release the commercial record albums of the score had to be conducted by others, rather than the composer, and that by a strange set of logistical difficulties it wasn't until only a few years ago that a commercial recording (on the Rhino label) of the original Ben Hur stereo music tracks, conducted in the film by Rozsa himself, was made available to the public - more than three decades late but certainly none the worse for it.

His comprehensive research during the preparation of the score for Quo Vadis (MGM, 1951) easily qualified him, and gave him the reputation, as something of an expert in the music of antiquity. He also had an enviable facility for solving difficult problems, even early in his musical life. In his memoirs, Double Life (Midas/Hippocrene Books, London/New York, 1982), he relates the following about his final exams in Leipzig: "In the practical examination, one of the tests was to modulate melodically from one given key to another in only eight bars in front of all the professors, including the head, Siegfrid Karg-Elert, who gave me the near-impossible C major to B sharp major. Luckily I was well prepared and I solved the problem to the jury's satisfaction."

Dr. Rozsa had joined MGM in 1950. During the next ten years, he scored a number of historical films the stories of which were set within a range of about as many centuries. It was therefore very fitting that he should score Ben Hur, as it shared with Quo Vadis some similar and related biblical story themes. Rozsa's penchant not only for musicology in general but also for authenticity in his "historical film" scores in particular, has imbued his film music with a scholarship, a "rightness," with which few, if any, composers have been able to offer any real competition. While the overall effect of a film's impact on the lay viewer may be difficult for him to explain, it is very easy to feel and certainly to actually recognize, even if only subconsciously. The status held by Rozsa in the annals of film music is, in a word, earned, and his reputation is, in a word, warranted. His death on July 27, 1995 at the age of 88 robbed the music world of one of the finest composers in Hollywood - and with the exception of David Raksin, Dr. Rozsa was the last survivor of Hollywood's Golden Age of composers.

Because of the exposure and popularity of films as an entertainment medium, Rozsa is more widely known for his film scores than for the music he has composed for other venues. His eminence as a composer of "absolute" music that is moving and inspiring in its own right is undisputed, especially in Europe, where he is perhaps even more revered in the concert hall than he is in the United States. Unlike most of those who made a career of composing for films, Rozsa's personal output includes concerti and sonatas for various instruments, piano, choral, orchestral and chamber music, and the like. He was one of the few composers in Hollywood who retained that link to the serious, classical arena by composing such music throughout his professional life. He was reading music before he could read words, he was conservatory-trained (in Leipzig), and he began his career as a composer with absolutely no thought whatsoever of scoring films.

He wrote his music - all of it - in bold, powerful tonal strokes, and it reflects his Hungarian origin, specific musical features of which, he said, are indelibly stamped on every bar of his music, regardless of how he may have had to modify his style, on a case by case basis, for the film scores he composed. His own distinctive musical style is an integral part of his tonal language: it has a particularly individualistic "Rozsa sound" and it can usually be felt in his film scores, which, in the treatment of their musical materials, are more conventional than his concert works. It's an expressive inflection whose characteristics and verve permit an immediate identification by those who are familiar with his work.

Music of real value can't be used in a film without becoming an integral part of it. It becomes a primary factor, perhaps the predominant one, which can initially set the mood for the entire feature.

Ways and Means

We all have our own personal preferences and methods. So did the composers regarding the composition and preparation of their scores. Being involved with a film from its inception (and, in the cases of certain kinds of films, being on location with the company during production) could afford the composer the opportunity of absorbing general but firsthand impressions of the atmosphere of the film itself, though unfortunately occasions like these weren't a feature of film-making and were the exceptions rather than the rule. Being thusly involved with the film could go a long way toward influencing the nature of the score that would ultimately come from the composer's pen. In such situations he could notate musical ideas as they occurred to him. This is what happened when Ben Hur and El Cid (MGM, 1961) were made (in Italy and in Spain, respectively), and it certainly accounts, at least in part, for the particular flavor of these Rozsa scores.

Charlton Heston as Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar (i.e., El Cid)

Parenthetically, the sight of a man lost in creative thought, his very gait affected by the sounds going through his mind, and his intermittent stopping here and there to jot down bits and snatches of theme have in public places elicited strange stares and even stranger comment. Composers have been prone to this, and it's Beethoven who exemplifies it: the deaf composer was often oblivious to everything but his music, and when he became excited by some musical idea during a walk, he waved his hands and screamed melodies, occasionally frightening horses and unsuspecting strangers. Rozsa had a similar experience. He told the story of how he found himself carried away one Sunday morning, walking along the Palatine Hills in Rome, thinking of the marches he'd compose for Ben Hur and almost subconsciously striding in cadence with what he was hearing in his mind. Two young girls saw him thusly engaged, muttered "Pazzo!" (crazy), and left the area forthwith. "But of my insanity was born the 'Parade of the Charioteers' from Ben Hur," Rozsa later said.

It's a matter of record that a film's scenes are not filmed in chronological sequence. The last sequences of a movie that the viewer will see could have been among the first that were filmed. The process of composing a film score can assume similar characteristics: the music is often one of the last of a film's components to be applied to its completion, and for this reason the composer was usually given relatively little time in which to produce a score. (Some things haven't changed very much in this respect; one of the features of Jerry Goldsmith's dependability is that he can work and deliver very quickly).

Alfred Newman

Three to five weeks may have been an average period, with perhaps some additional time allotted for changes, editing, and translation of the score to the screen. Needless to say, the musical and personal requirements for film scoring were a master craftsmanship as well as the ability to sacrifice some sleep and sustenance for weeks on end. Academy Award winner Alfred Newman once wondered what could be accomplished if the composers were really given enough time to compose a film score.

The music for John Wayne's film The Alamo was composed by Dimitri Tiomkin, and Max Steiner had written the score for an earlier movie, The Last Command, an Alamo-related film in which the focus was on James Bowie, portrayed by the late Sterling Hayden. In each film, the siege of the Alamo was depicted as a feature of the story, and both composers leaned, quite naturally, toward drama in their music. It's noteworthy, however, that neither composer used even a paraphrase of the dreaded De Guello, the historical Mexican Army bugle tune (from the collection titled El Soldado Mexicano), literally signaling "no prisoners, no quarter," and which was sounded before the final assault on the Alamo on Sunday, March 6, 1836. Even the very term De Guello suggests the concept of "guillotine." ("The word De Guello signifies the act of beheading or throat-cutting . . . which meant complete destruction of the enemy without mercy" - Handbook of Texas Online). "The music was a hymn of hate and merciless death, played to spur the Mexican troops forward in their final assault on the Alamo." Thus wrote Walter Lord in "A Time to Stand," for decades considered a definitive telling of the Alamo tale - - although a more recent book, by historian J.R. Edmondson, "The Alamo Story: From Early History to Current Conflicts" (Republic of Texas Press, Plano, Texas), sheds newer and more comprehensive light on the matter and has been cited as a volume that could replace Walter Lord's as the last word in Alamo books.

Of course, both Tiomkin and Steiner composed their own original scores for these films. In The Alamo, Tiomkin's musical treatment of the scenes preceding the assault is a natural outgrowth of the music that came before it, and is tuneful and symphonic in spirit, with his "De Guello" melody an ominous and threatening paraphrase of the poignant main theme of the film's opening credits, the musical features of which are solo trumpet and guitar for a "Mexican flavoring." Both of those passages were written by Tiomkin predominantly in a minor key. Max Steiner's musical treatment of the corresponding cinematic event in The Last Command, on the other hand, is as diametrically different from Tiomkin's as any two musical passages could be. Steiner's is polytonal, remarkably chromatic, and strident in the extreme (music played in major and minor keys simultaneously has a noticeable - and when combined with the visuals of a film, unsettling - dissonance). Steiner's "De Guello" has an almost frightening brutality that's more in keeping with what the Alamo defenders ultimately experienced at the hands of Santa Anna on that fateful morning so long ago. At this point in the film, a short but very telling dialog seems to encapsulate the situation in the proverbial nutshell: "It gives me the willies!" said Arthur Hunnicutt (who portrayed Davy Crockett) to Sterling Hayden, whose response was, "It's meant to."

Dimitri Tiomkin the "De Guello" (starting at fifth staff from bottom)

Miklos Rozsa, on the other hand, researched his historical films as thoroughly as possible and thus gave the additional dimension of musical authenticity to his work. Though Western films were not his primary venue (he did score Tribute To a Bad Man), it's entirely reasonable to presume that had he composed the music for The Alamo, he would have used - even if only in variation - the authentic De Guello bugle tune, and which was the last music the actual Alamo defenders ever heard. Conjecture is fruitless but still fascinating.

Though most viewers, being movie-goers and not musicians, would have been unaware of that extra touch, Rozsa's efforts tightened the fabric and strengthened its fit as a component of his historical films. When preparing the score for El Cid, for example, he consulted in Spain with Don Ramón Menendez Pidál, then the world's foremost authority on the Spanish middle ages, who directed Rozsa to the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of works by El Rey Alfonso El Sabio (King Alfonso The Wise). That Dr. Rozsa based some of his music for El Cid on some of the chants in that collection was entirely consistent with his aims, and surprised no-one.

For a few of his young (and in retrospect, naïve) teenage years, the author hoped - vainly, as it turned out - to eventually find scores or recordings of musical works like a requiem by Alfred Newman, an orchestral rhapsody by Dimitri Tiomkin, a symphony by Max Steiner, a concerto by Victor Young, or sonatas and string quartets by the other composers. He soon relinquished his innocence and learned that most of those who worked for the studios composed exclusively for the screen, and with the exception of pieces written in their student days, works from their pens like sonatas, concerti, and other music intended for recital or concert performance were non-existent. The following story (though it may be apocryphal) was related to the author by one of the composers in Hollywood. England's Prince Phillip, chatting with Dimitri Tiomkin, asked if the composer planned to write something for one of London's concert halls. Tiomkin is said to have responded in his inimitable Russian accent, "No! Concert music doesn't make the money!"

Special Sounds From Special Instruments

Unusual instruments are used in film scores to instill the effect of authenticity, and to create and retain particular moods in a film.

In the use of a special musical sound for a psychological effect, a major step was taken with the appearance of Alfred Hitchcock's film, Spellbound (United Artists, 1945), the score for which Rozsa was to win his first Academy Award. Rozsa decided to use the theremin, an electronic instrument which produces an eerie, whining sound and which appeared here in a film score for the first time (though certainly not the last).

It should be noted that the composer's function in the context of a movie is not to force his music upon the audience, but to infuse the music into the film by an integration between image and sound. Composing music is a serious and solitary matter but film-making is a team effort. Indeed, since the composer's very objective is composition and not "imposition," an earnest composer will not try to make himself the star of the film. ("Just who's going up that staircase? - - me, or Max Steiner?!" - attributed to Bette Davis). It's been said that a good score can't save a bad picture, but that, paradoxically, a bad score won't invalidate a good movie.

Rozsa shares in the responsibility for Spellbound's psychological atmosphere and for the film's now-classic status. The results of his efforts are not only a classic film but a classic score: so effective is Rozsa's music, for the appropriate sequences, as an integral and effective component of the film that the viewer can become aware not so much of the music's presence, but rather of its absence when it stops. Additionally, the main musical theme of Spellbound, a lush, romantic melody played by conventional musical forces, also became extremely popular and for many years enjoyed a life of its own on recordings and in printed editions. It remains among some of Rozsa's most memorable film music.

the author (right) with Elmer Bernstein

In The Ten Commandments (Paramount, 1956), composer Elmer Bernstein (no relation to the New York Philharmonic's late Laureate Conductor, Leonard Bernstein) used some unusual instruments mainly in the interests of authenticity, rather than to deliberately create any special effect. (An exception involved the "Angel of Death" sequence, in which the composer used the theremin). During the Exodus sequence, a shofar (ram's horn) was heard, symbolizing the slaves' freedom after 400 years in bondage. According to Hebraic tradition, this was the instrument that heralded the Exodus from Egypt 33 centuries ago. Replicas of authentic ancient Egyptian percussion instruments were used during the Egyptian Dance sequence (among the first to be scored by Bernstein for this film), such as the tiple, finger cymbals, and sistrum. The combination of these instruments helped to enhance a flavor of lavishness in the Pharaoh's palace. The music for this memorable film - made more so by Bernstein's memorable score - was otherwise scored for the standard (though augmented) symphony orchestra ensemble. Elmer Bernstein is still very active in composing music for films and has been the most recorded of all composers who have worked in Hollywood. As human beings, some people have an innate ability to bring out the best in others. Elmer Bernstein is among them, to which this author bears witness.

Time constraints often dictated the need for orchestrators at the studios. Most of the composers in Hollywood used them, and many had orchestrators with whom they developed an important professional relationship and personal rapport. In a long-ago phone conversation, Bernstein told this author that the orchestration of his score for The Ten Commandments was done by Leo Shuken and Lucien Caillet. That two orchestrators were used seems to correspond aptly to the magnitude of both this score and the film itself.

The "partnership" between Miklos Rozsa and his orchestrator Eugene Zador (a fellow countryman) coincided in some ways with the professional collaborations between Brahms and violinist Joseph Joachim, who gave the first performance of Brahms' Violin Concerto in Leipzig, and between Felix Mendelssohn and violinist Ferdinand Davíd. Davíd was the concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, a member of the faculty of that city's Conservatory (which had been founded by Mendelssohn himself), and was soloist in the premier of the composer's Violin Concerto.

Bernard Herrmann, and an example of his letterhand

The principal exception in Hollywood was Bernard Herrmann, who insisted on orchestrating his own music himself. Before he began composing music for films, Henry Mancini spent years as a staff orchestrator at Universal, usually uncredited in the films for which he orchestrated the scores.

In Spartacus (Universal,1960), composer Alex North, who passed away in 1991, strove for a barbaric quality in his music for the relevant scenes. In this case the ondioline, an electronic keyboard instrument resembling a small piano and developed in Paris, enhanced an archaic atmosphere by producing simultaneously the sounds of several instruments, including woodwinds, mandolin and percussion. At the finish of the opening credits, some of the music of which is treated fugally, the music ends by harmonically disintegrating before our ears - a brilliant musical analogy to the decay and eventual downfall, albeit centuries later, of the Roman Empire itself. As Bela Bartok was called The Composer's Composer, and as Spencer Tracy was called The Actor's Actor, Alex North's status as a composer in Hollywood prompted his unofficial but apt title, The Boss.

(left) Alex North - (right) Franz Waxman

Among the finest of composers in Hollywood was Franz Waxman. An earnest man and a serious musician (he performed with Isaac Stern, among others), he wrote many works specifically for the concert hall in addition to his film scores. He, Miklos Rozsa and Erich Wolfgang Korngold were the only major composers in Hollywood to do so. It's significant, too, that each of them were conservatory-trained.

Waxman often devoted more effort to a score than the film's quality really warranted. "Many of the films he scored barely deserved the effort he put into them," wrote Tony Thomas in Film Score: The Art & Craft of Movie Music. That Waxman did this bespeaks the seriousness of purpose that distinguishes the exceptional man and musician from the commonplace. Among composers in Hollywood, Waxman was arguably the greatest musical psychologist who ever wrote for films. In the texture and careful placing of music, it was a trait he shared with his colleague at Warner Brothers, Max Steiner. For appropriate film sequences, Waxman's music is subtle, not blatant and obvious, and slips easily into viewers' subconscious awareness.

Music is one of the most important elements in our enjoyment of a film, even when actually intended as "background" music. Waxman was a master of the kind of surprising and very effective harmonic musical progressions that influence the overall impact his films have on us. The scores he composed for his biblical-subject films, in particular, seem to have special musical spirit. Though entirely a product of his own imagination, it's a testament to Franz Waxman's intellect and skill as a composer that the main theme for The Story of Ruth seems to have a more Hebraic flavor than many such authentic melodies.

Coda

Original music was being composed for movies as far back as the 1930s with the scores for the RKO films King Kong (1933) composed by Max Steiner, and Gunga Din (1939) composed by Alfred Newman (the recipient of more Academy Awards, as composer as well as musical director, than any other composer in Hollywood). The links in the chain that binds us to our own musical history seem larger and stronger when we consider that Newman had studied piano with Sigismond Stojowski (himself a student of Paderewski), and that Max Steiner had spent some time receiving instruction from none other than Gustav Mahler.

Even as early as 1907, a composer of no less stature than Camille Saint-Saêns had been engaged to write special background music for the Film D'Art, Paris, production of L'Assassination Du Duc De Guise (the composer's Op.128, for piano, harmonium and strings), but since those times music for the movies has, to say the very least, broadened in scope and significance, though perhaps not in its ultimate objective.

Some of the most important composers of various by-gone eras were represented in the films made by Universal-International during the 1930s. As background music behind the action in the films, their features and serials made use of portions of many well-known classics, ranging from Schubert's "Unfinished" symphony as well as Bach's Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C-major for organ (in The Black Cat, 1934), to Heinz Roemheld's own orchestration of Brahms' stirring piano Rhapsody in B-minor, Op.79 #1 (in The Raven, 1935), and Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture (in the Flash Gordon serials). Even the 1931 Dracula (Universal) has its opening credits accompanied by a re-orchestrated, modified excerpt from Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, and during the film itself Bela Lugosi is seen sauntering down the aisle of a London concert hall almost in cadence with the closing measures of Wagner's Prelude to Die Meistersinger. It was surprising but fitting when Dimitri Tiomkin, in accepting an Oscar, revealed his thanks to his "collaborators - Wagner, Tchaikowsky, Brahms, Strauss" - a clear acknowledgement of the composers of previous eras whose music influenced the work of those who were now writing for the silver screen.

However, the significance of the finest film music has been not only to underscore the action in the film, but to tell even more than the same story, and yet in its own language.

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It's here that I must forsake an author's anonimity and take a personal role. Having had the honor of knowing Miklos Rozsa personally for several decades, I attended the rehearsals and West Coast USA premiere in Los Angeles of his Viola Concerto in 1988. Twice during that week Dr. Rozsa invited me to his home. Over the years countless people attended Rozsa's concerts and many had the pleasure of personally making his acquaintance - but only a select few had the privilege of entering the sanctuary of Rozsa's magnificent home in the Hollywood Hills. I'm very thankful I am one of them.

Dr. Rozsa had asked me to phone him when I arrived in Los Angeles. When I did so, he invited me to the house and added, "But I can't offer you dinner this time." I assured him that it was only a visit I wanted, not his food, and that the privilege of spending some time with him would be all I would ask. I was ultimately graced with a good deal more than what I had wished for or expected.

Dr. Rozsa was unable to attend any of the rehearsals but he was at the first performance of the concerto, held at the Los Angeles Music Center's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (the site of many Academy Award ceremonies). André Previn conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Pinchas Zukerman as viola soloist. After the performance, I was talking with Dr. Rozsa. A grey-haired, distinguished-looking bespectacled man in a powder-blue blazer came up and spoke with Dr. Rozsa about the concerto. Dr. Rozsa interrupted the man for a moment, looked at me, and, pointing to the man, said, "Jeffrey - David Raksin."

David Raskin

On one of those occasions that week at Dr. Rozsa's home I met Tony Thomas, whom I later learned was a frequent visitor (i.e., several times weekly) to the Rozsa home. It was Tony Thomas who wrote that among all the convoluted film folk in Hollywood, the composers were among the sanest and most enlightened.

On my first visit to Dr. Rozsa's home I had what was effectively a "private audience" with the composer for several hours. I also had a repeat-performance of this kind of experience the following year in Michigan, when a man named Elmer Bernstein invited me for what turned out to be a chat between the two of us in his hotel suite for the better part of an hour.

A remark made about Miklos Rozsa bears repetition here. John Fitzpatrick, another visitor to the Rozsa residence that week, the founder of The Miklos Rozsa Society in the USA and director of their newsletter, Pro Musica Sana (the title was suggested by Dr. Rozsa himself), noted in a previous issue, "As a raconteur I have never met his equal." This might be the most appropriate description of Rozsa as a storyteller and hits the proverbial nail on the head.

Dr. Rozsa served me tea & cookies. This warrants mention here because I had already been told by his son, Nicholas, that this was a long-standing tradition in the Rozsa household and since then I've heard the same thing from a number of different sources, independently of each other, who had the same experience at Rozsa's home. We are creatures of habit. Brahms continued writing with quills well into the 1890s even after they were long out of fashion, and Dr. Rozsa was as loyal to his tea & cookies tradition as he was to imitative writing, one of his favorite compositional tools - and to the multitudes who admired him and his work. The cups & saucers were Wedgwood - real antique Wedgwood - and the teapot was evidently solid silver. (The lid was loose and Rozsa told me to be very careful when pouring). The spoons, also silver, must have weighed a pound each and I was convinced that had I dropped one of them on my foot I'd have broken a toe. The thought occurred to me at the time that the beauty and worth of the Wedgwood set, and the weight of the teapot and spoons corresponded fittingly to the substance of Rozsa's music. I learned only relatively recently, directly from Dr. Rozsa's daughter, Juliet, that the tea service was acquired in Spain when the composer was there with his family during the scoring of El Cid.

Near the entrance to his living room I saw the official Vatican document he had received, signed by Pope John Paul in honor of the composer's 80th birthday the year before. I examined the large book containing the congratulatory letters (most of them hand-written) which he had received in that milestone year from dozens of people, including, to name but two, Gregory Peck and Elmer Bernstein. I held and examined his Oscars, I sat in the very chair in which he was photographed, holding & reading a score, for the RCA LP album of his 1st recording of the Notturno Ungherese, on which he conducted the RCA Italiana Orchestra; that photo is one of the best I've ever seen of him. He sent me upstairs - the house was built around a central spiral staircase - where I met Mrs. Rozsa briefly. She told me I look just like her brother, and that I had given her a start when I entered the room: for an instant she thought I was him. Visiting her at that moment was Mrs. Abraham Marcus, widow of Dr. Rozsa's long-time friend and lawyer.

The author (left) with Dr. Miklos Rozsa. (Oct. 1978)

Dr. Rozsa also took me into that place in his home which interested me more than any other: his studio, his sanctum sanctorum, where I saw his Bechstein grand piano (". . . which I dearly love," he once told me in a letter), and myriad other delectables. The connection between Rozsa and his fellow-countryman Franz Liszt wasn't merely one of nationality: the piano in Liszt's house in Weimar, Germany, was also a massive Bechstein concert grand, on view there even today. Rozsa's film scores, all bound, were in plain view, scattered helter-skelter atop a large credenza. The whereabouts of his original manuscripts of the absolute (i.e., non-film) music, however, were not as evident. When I asked him where he kept them, he pointed to a file cabinet in a corner of the studio. I felt it was very apt that his film music, more traditional than his orchestral, piano, chamber and other works intended for recital or concert performance, was more "accessible" even here in the composer's own studio than his orchestral and other scores, which he kept in the file cabinet: like the study of his music or any significant masterwork, treasures can be many and great for those who seek them. If only there had been more time, I'd have asked to see, even if only briefly, the holograph manuscript of his Notturno Ungherese (Hungarian Nocturne), one of my own personal favorites among all his works.

His studio was reached through a long, narrow hallway. Every square foot of wall space was lined with autograph letters of the composers, mounted in special frames so that when turned around the overside of each letter could also be read. The only major composers not represented, he told me, were Bach and Beethoven. Name any other representative composer and at least one example of his letterhand could be found there. Dr.Rozsa even had a letter written by Robert Schumann's mother. Brahms, Wagner, Chopin, Liszt - name them, and there they were.

I've learned and remembered many things in my years of living. What I will never forget are the last words Dr. Rozsa ever said to me, before I left his home that day: "Thank you for coming to see me. May God bless you, Jeffrey" - - a wish fulfilled.

Author's Autobiogrphy

Jeffrey Dane is an independent music historian, researcher, journalist and essayist whose work appears in the USA and abroad in several languages, and in both print and online publications. Much of his online-published work can be accessed by typing his name in the Search box of www.google.com. Among the composers in Hollywood with whom he has met and spoken are Miklos Rozsa, Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, David Raksin and Franz Waxman.

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