Miklós Rózsa

Miklos Rozsa (1907,4,18 ~ 1995,7,27) 出身匈牙利首都布達佩斯的大地主家庭，從小就在極其奢華且具文化氣息的環(huán)境下長大。其母親是鋼琴家，曾師從李斯特的學生；父親也是音樂愛好者，熱愛匈牙利民歌。Rozsa 5歲開始學小提琴，以后也學了中提琴和鋼琴。他8歲就會演奏莫扎特小提琴協奏曲而被視為音樂神童，因此他接受正統古典音樂的訓練，師從 Bartok, Kodaly 等人。Rozsa 也曾在郊區(qū)的別墅附近搜集了不少匈牙利民歌素材。和 Fritz Reiner, George Szell, Georg Solti 等名指揮家算是同鄉(xiāng)且背景相似，后來另一個共同點是二戰(zhàn)時都流亡到西方國家。 　　 　　1925 年，18 歲的 Rozsa 不大喜歡留在布達佩斯，遂前往德國進入萊比錫大學攻讀化學，但是 Hermann Grabner 游說 Rozsa 的父親表示他的天賦適合全職攻讀音樂。他進入了萊比錫音樂學院，并師從 Hermann Grabner 。天賦過人的 Rozsa 在1929 年以優(yōu)等成績獲得學位后才確定走向音樂創(chuàng)作的路線。這時他的創(chuàng)作重心仍以小提琴的協奏曲和奏鳴曲為主（此時他出版了弦樂三充奏，作品編號1，和鋼琴五重奏，作品編號2），1931 年他畢業(yè)后感覺德國反猶太勢力高漲，因此改前往巴黎發(fā)展，在巴黎他認識了 Richard Strauss 和 Ernst Donanyi，他們非常賞識他的作品，讓 Rozsa 對自己的小提琴作品更有信心。在巴黎他創(chuàng)作了一些管弦樂作品，獲受好評，著名指揮家 Charles Munch，Karl Bohm，Georg Solti，Eugene Ormandy 和 Leonard Bernstein 等皆有演出過這些作品。 　　 　　
但是 1934 年一件偶發(fā)事件卻影響他后半生的方向，當時歐洲電影剛有聲化沒多久，法國導演 Jacques Feyder 請他為電影 Knight without Armour 配樂，剛開始 Rozsa 意愿不高，只把它當作副業(yè)，有個趣聞是傳說 Rozsa 迷上了這部片女主角 Marlene Dietrich (中譯：瑪琳黛德麗，一個傳聞 60 歲時稍為化妝一下還能演 30 歲角色的美女) 才決定投入此工作，不過后來這部片票房大獲成功，加上歐陸納粹勢力高漲，Rozsa 將工作重心轉往倫敦加入了 London Film Production。 　　 　　
到了 1940 年二次大戰(zhàn)爆發(fā)，London Film Production 老板 Alexander Korda 決定將公司搬到美國西岸的 Hollywood，身為猶太人的 Rozsa 只能選擇一起前往美國，到了完全陌生的美國，使得 Rozsa 后半生投入原先只拿來當副業(yè)的電影配樂工作。 　　 　　
Rozsa 前往美國之后重心轉向電影配樂工作，他深厚的音樂基礎揮灑起來綽綽有余，1944 年他為一部投資不大的偵探電影 《雙重保險》 (Double Indemnity) 配樂時，這部片的制片人 Billy Wilder 等人驚呼 "這根本不是該在這里出現的音樂，這應該在 Carnegie Hall 演奏的！" ，1947 年 Rozsa 約滿后馬上被經費最充足擅長拍大場面電影的米高梅 (MGM) 公司挖角。 　　 　　
Rozsa 遇到米高梅公司有如千里馬遇到伯樂，他最著名的幾部作品都出現在接下來和米高梅 12 年的合約時期里，例如：《賓漢》 (Ben-Hur)，《暴君焚城錄》 (Quo Vadis)，《劫后英雄傳》(Ivanhoe)，《凱撒傳》(Julius Caesar)，《梵谷傳》 (Lust for Life) 和《福爾摩斯的私生活》(The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes) 。Miklos Rozsa的音樂帶有相當濃厚的匈牙利色彩，并富于浪漫激情。 晚年的Miklos Rozsa在美國加利福尼亞州教授音樂。他出版過自傳：《二次人生》(Double Life)。
by Bruce Eder
A Hungarian-born composer, most famous for his Hollywood and British film scores, but also responsible for a significant body of chamber pieces, concertos, and orchestral music for the concert hall. Rozsa's music is steeped in post-romanticism, with stylistic roots in the folk music of his native Hungary and some slight influences from those two giants of 20th-century Hungarian music, Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly.
Born in Budapest to a wealthy industrialist and landowner, Miklos Rozsa spent his boyhood summers on his father's country estate, where he first encountered the peasantry of the surrounding villages, and began absorbing all he could of their music. He began playing the violin at age five, and later studied the viola and the piano, and made his public performing debut at age seven. Rozsa became an important member of the Franz Liszt Society while in high school, but was branded a rebel by school administrators for a pair of speeches that he made defending the work of Bartok and Kodaly, who were regarded as extremely controversial modernists.
In 1925, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig as a chemistry major, to satisfy his father's wishes, but he switched to music after his first year. His teachers included Herman Grabner and Karl Straube, the cantor of Thomaskirche. During his undergraduate years, Rozsa wrote his first formal composition, the Trio-Serenade for Strings, and followed this with the Piano Quintet in F Minor, the Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra, and his Variations on a Hungarian Peasant Song. The Piano Quintet so impressed Straube that he brought it to the attention of the major publishing house Breitkopf & Hartel, which agreed to publish it and the Trio-Serenade. Following his graduation in 1929, Rozsa worked as an assistant to Grabner in Leipzig, before moving to Paris in 1931. His Serenade received a performance in Budapest under Ernest von Dohnanyi, where it was heard by Richard Strauss, who strongly encouraged the young composer to continue writing music. His major breakthrough took place in 1934, with the premiere of his Theme, Variations and Finale, which was quickly taken up into the repertories of such renowned conductors as Charles Munch, Karl Bohm, and Carl Schuricht, and, later, Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter, and Leonard Bernstein.
Rozsa discovered movie music in the mid-'30s, when he learned that his friend, composer Arthur Honneger, had written the score for a film. Impressed with the results, Rozsa began to study movies more closely for the role that music played in them. In 1937, he was invited to write the score for the romantic espionage thriller Knight Without Armour, starring Marlene Dietrich and Robert Donat, which became an international hit. Soon after, Rozsa was asked to join the staff of its production company, London Films -- founded by his fellow Hungarian expatriate Alexander Korda -- and during the next three years, he scored such classic movies as The Four Feathers and The Thief of Baghdad. When producer Alexander Korda was forced to move the latter film's production from London to Hollywood in 1940, Rozsa was among the London Films staff members who made the journey.
Having reached the filmmaking capital of the world, Rozsa made his way as a freelance composer for several years, primarily in the employ of Paramount Pictures in the films of Billy Wilder (Five Graves to Cairo, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend), producer David O. Selznick for Alfred Hitchcock (Spellbound), and the occasional Korda production (That Hamilton Woman, The Jungle Book). Following his winning of Oscars for Spellbound (1945) and A Double Life (1948), Rozsa joined the staff of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he worked for the next 15 years, doing the music for such classic films as Ben-Hur, for which he won his third Oscar. During this period, he did not forsake his concert music, writing such pieces as his Lullaby and Madrigal for Spring, the solo piano piece Kaleidoscope, the motet To Everything There Is a Season, and his First String Quartet. Rozsa's contract with the studio gave him his summers free to compose, and complete autonomy from the studio in his concert music activities.
In 1953, the famed violinist Jascha Heifetz, having seen some of Rozsa's sketches for a proposed violin concerto, commissioned the piece from Rozsa -- it was premiered in 1956 and recorded the same year on RCA. The Violin Concerto proved an enduringly popular work, and its success led to the 1961 joint commission from Heifetz and his equally famous colleague, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, for a piece utilizing violin and cello, the Sinfonia Concertante. The 1960s saw Rozsa compose such large-scale orchestral pieces as the Notturno Ungherese, a Piano Concerto for the virtuoso Leonard Pennario, and a Cello Concerto written for Janos Starker. His 1970s output saw Rozsa turn toward such solo works as the Valse Crepusculaire for piano, although he also completed a Viola Concerto for Pinchas Zuckerman, which was premiered in 1984.
Rozsa was the most successful of his generation of film composers at balancing his movie and concert work. Unlike Erich Wolfgang Korngold, his concert music didn't suffer from his stay in Hollywood, and, in contrast to Bernard Herrmann, Rozsa always had a well-defined and recognizable "voice" as a serious composer. Occasionally, he would even mix the two careers -- Rozsa wrote the score for his old friend Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), and also can be seen in the film, conducting his own Violin Concerto. He remained active as a composer in the mid-'80s, earning another Oscar nomination for his score for Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time (1979), and continued publishing new works into the end of the decade.
Despite the onset of advancing age and a debilitating stroke, which combined to end his career in the concert hall, Rozsa retained an active interest in all of his music into the 1990s. He assisted in the recordings of new versions of his orchestral works by conductor James Sedares on the Koch International label in the 1990s, and even resurrected such works as the Symphony in Three Movements, which he withdrew from publication in 1930. More post-romantic than modernist, Rozsa's music is tonal and melodic, often achingly so, and his work at its most accessible -- which is nearly all of it -- recalls the music of Dvorak, Janacek, and Respighi, although it is drawn from Hungarian sources, rather than Czech or Italian roots. And despite his post-romantic and nationalistic leanings, Rozsa's work was also characterized by an almost classical-era restraint, economy, and discipline, which makes it eminently more listenable than the serious work of most of his Hollywood contemporaries (Bernard Herrmann comes to mind), who seldom understood the notion of restraint. His work could bring recollections of pre-World War I Budapest alive; lift the rhythms, harmonies, and melodies of Hungarian folk music to symphonic heights; or, on the screen, express the myriad emotions behind human behavior, from cold-blooded murder in The Killers to the teachings of Jesus in Ben-Hur.