One of the strangest features of present-day musical life is what virtually amounts to a conspiracy of silence about almost the only form of serious contemporary music to reach a really mass audience: music for film, of course. If I write some earnest piece of concert music, let's call it "Concatenations III" for seven instruments and pre-recorded tape, and if I persuade someone to perform it at a reasonably respectable hall in central London before an audience of eleven people, there's a pretty good chance that it'll be reviewed somewhere or other. If, on the other hand, I write a two-hour score for a film that'll be seen by several million people, it's most unlikely that any music critic will notice it, regardless of its quality.Miklós Rózsa is one of the most successful, sought-after and widely heard of living composers. He wrote the scores for Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur, El Cid, Sherlock Holmes, dozens of highly popular films. And he's pursued a separate, parallel career in the concert hall as well. But it's only recently, and he'll be 70 on Monday, remember, that his name has aroused enthusiasm among the musical public, as distinct from cinema-goers. He has no more enthusiastic admirer than Christopher Palmer, from whom this birthday tribute to Miklós Rózsa.
He was born in Budapest in 1907, the son of a landowning industrialist whose country estate lay in northern Hungary at the foot of the Matra mountains. Here the Rózsa family would spend every summer, and it was here that the future composer discovered the authentic music of the Magyar peasantry, to which every note he himself was to write would be indebted in one form or another. To most artists, there comes one moment of revelation which changes the entire course of their lives. This was his. He collected folk songs in his own village and roundabout, and at the age of 22 assembled the cream of his collection in a suite which he called North Hungarian Peasant Songs and Dances.
[music for violin and piano is heard]
However, Rózsa rarely made use of actual folk tunes. What he did instead was instinctively to follow Bartók's precepts and absorb the salient characteristics of this peasant music so thoroughly that he came to speak musically with an authoritative and instantly recognizable Hungarian accent. He spent the rest of his life trying to recreate the revelatory experience of that early encounter, trying to express himself musically in the language of his surroundings and of his patrimony. This being so, we might have expected Rózsa to become a pupil of Bartok or Kodály, remain in Hungary and be caught up in the mainstream of the Hungarian nationalist movement. But he sensed instinctively that he needed a wider musical context in which to realise his true individuality. And what a shrewd move it was when he went to Leipzig to study. For he found that steeping himself in the traditions of German classicism and romanticism, far from stifling the indigenous Hungarian impetus, helped to give it a sense of purpose and general orientation. Even in an early work, such as the Piano Quintet, one has visions of Hungarian peasants dancing on the graves of Brahms and Reger. But the first real milestone in Rózsa's career, and the work in which his style first set sure in its mould was the Theme, Variations and Finale, written in Paris at the age of 26, first performed by Charles Munch and then taken up by distinguished conductors all over Europe and America. The theme itself is folk-song-like in character, but it's not a folk song, and so it can be subdued by the composer to all kinds of contrasting formations and metamorphosis without any sense of strain. Here's one of the later variations. In it, we can sense that undercurrent of primitive violence which is never far away from Rózsa's allegros, and which is, of course, a direct legacy from peasant music.
[music is heard]
Nearly 20 years later, the same violence breaks out again as a music of the American urban underworld in the film The Asphalt Jungle.
[music is heard]
But by the time of the Theme, Variations and Finale, Rózsa had already found himself, and he's preserved an undeviating identity to this day. Which doesn't mean that he's simply gone on writing the same music over and over again. It means that he's continued to express the same areas of feeling, but in ever-changing perspectives. In the Concerto for Strings, we can hear the agony of Hungary under Nazi domination, but the ravaged intensity of that wartime work gives no intimation of the fact that it was written in the sunny security of California, where the composer settled in 1940 after living successively in Germany, Paris and London. What it does tell us most forcibly is that Rózsa as a composer has never ever left Hungary. Forty years of self-imposed exile have served only to deepen the already impassioned, elegiac character of his lyricism, and this yearning and uprootedness are voiced nowhere more poignantly than in the Violin Concerto of 1954, written for Heifetz, who gave its first performance and then recorded it. Yet, as always in Rózsa, the innate romanticism is balanced and tempered by the disciplinary toughness, which is the most enduring benefit he derived from his Leipzig days. There is no conflict between the folk song inspired melodic material and the classical formal procedures it follows because the one is set to and shaped by the other.
[music is heard]
Rózsa followed his violin concerto with concerti for piano, cello and violin and cello. Other important scores include the 1949 piano sonata, the 1952 Vintner's Daughter variations, the 1956 Overture to a Symphony Concert, and most recently the Tripartita for Orchestra. But no account of Rózsa's career would be complete without some mention of his contribution to films, because this added a totally new dimension to his stature as a composer. It brought to the surface a strong dramatic streak which otherwise might have remained unrealized. Always in a film, his concern was to tell the audience something which could not be told them in any other way. The example I've chosen comes from the climax of Ben-Hur, at the moment of the crucifixion, when, in the middle of a terrific thunderstorm, the hero's mother and sister realize that they have been miraculously cured of their leprosy.
[music is heard in the background]
Now, if we were actually present at such a scene, we would experience the emotions of wonder and ecstasy. But we are not actually present, and so these emotions have to be created artificially, by music. The music is the communicating link between screen and audience, reaching out and enveloping us in the experience.
[music increases in volume]
Did you perhaps notice that the melody which formed the basis of that sequence persistently sharpened the fourth degree of the scale? Now, the sharp fourth is one of the commonest features of Hungarian folk music, and its use in this context is typical of the way in which Rózsa draws no hard and fast distinction between composing for the cinema and composing for any other medium. The same inward ardour and expressive honesty is present in whatever he writes. It has to be, for his music is essentially song, and song is the natural and instinctive expression of man's desire to heighten his gladness and ennoble his sorrows. If we agree with Wilfred Mellers that what makes music contemporary is not the date at which it was composed, but the quality of "felt life" it incarnates, then we must acknowledge Rózsa as a fine contemporary composer. Here to end with is the finale of the 1952 Hungarian Serenade, a wild peasant dance which generates a charge of purely physical excitement. It's the kind of music that's hard to resist because it appeals in every man to something obscure and latent, something older than the present organisation of his nature. Any composer who can articulate such an impulse, in whatever form, is surely worth getting to know.
[music is heard]
Miklós Rózsa's Hungarian Serenade ends that 70th birthday tribute from Christopher Palmer. On the birthday itself, which is tomorrow, you can hear a concert of Rózsa's music, including that serenade, here on Radio 3 at 2 o'clock in the afternoon.