Miklós Rózsa

Miklós Rózsa called it his double life and eventually made the phrase the title of his autobiography: concert composer and film composer, held in parallel for half a century. Born in Budapest in 1907, he grew up with Hungarian folk melody around him and studied at the Leipzig Conservatory from 1925 with Hermann Grabner, building an early European reputation with orchestral and chamber works played in Germany and France. Jacques Feyder and then Alexander Korda drew him into film, and The Thief of Bagdad carried him to Hollywood, where he wrote close to a hundred scores and won Academy Awards for Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1947) and Ben-Hur (1959). His film scores include Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend, and he used the theremin in Spellbound. His concert works include a Violin Concerto of 1953–54 for Jascha Heifetz and a Cello Concerto for János Starker premièred in Berlin in 1969. He taught at the University of Southern California and died in Los Angeles in 1995. In Leipzig he also studied choral music with Karl Straube at the Thomaskirche and assisted Grabner for a time, and his first two opus numbers, a String Trio and a Piano Quintet, appeared in those years. He moved to France in the early 1930s; accounts differ between 1931 and 1932. Theme, Variations and Finale was premiered in Duisburg in 1934. He settled in Britain in 1935, initially working on a ballet, and subsequently worked for Korda's London Films. Asphalt Jungle, Lady Hamilton, El Cid and Providence are among his other scores.