Suite (Ben-Hur)

Rózsa spent roughly a year on Ben-Hur in 1958–59 and produced about two and a half hours of music, at the time the longest score written for a feature film. He studied surviving Greek and Roman fragments, avoided nineteenth-century church style for the Roman material, and reserved a modal, hymn-like idiom for the scenes touching on Christ, who is given no theme of his own. The chariot race runs with no music at all. The score brought Rózsa his third Academy Award and became the model against which later epic film scoring was measured.