Miklós Rózsa was in England to conduct a program at the Royal Albert Hall called Filmharmonic featuring his music and that of other composers on October 17, 1972. Details about this interview like the name of the announcer ("Walsh"?) are not available. This file has been edited. – M.Q.
ANNOUNCER: Miklos Rózsa has written the score for many, many Hollywood movies: El Cid, Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur, Spellbound, and The Thief of Bagdad,. Just to even up the score and show there was a lighter side to his writing, he's the man who provided much of the music for Metro-Golwyn-Mayer films for a period of what? How many years?
RÓZSA: It was a long sentence, 14 years. 14 years of writing for movies.
ANNOUNCER: And of course you've written music apart from this.
RÓZSA: Oh yes, since I was six years old.
ANNOUNCER: How did you come into film music writing? Was it just one of those things that happened when you were in America?
RÓZSA: No, no, it happened here in London in 1936, and accidentally.
(Rózsa relates the story of how he became a film music composer after he helped director Jacques Feyder deal with his laundry, because Feyder could not speak English. Rózsa scored Feyder's Knight Without Armour, starring Marlene Dietrich and Robert Donat. Along with the film's score, Rózsa was supposed to write a song for Dietrich to sing.)
ANNOUNCER: And what was the song that you wrote for Marlene? Or did you ever get around to it?
RÓZSA: No, I wrote the song. It was a sort of a Russian song. She was a Russian princess. And it was a Russian song, but the picture got longer and longer and longer, and finally they forgot about the song.
ANNOUNCER: But you were in movies.
RÓZSA: I was in.
ANNOUNCER: And the obvious way to get in the movies is to find out how to say in English, "Could you take the laundry away, please?"
RÓZSA: It helps.
ANNOUNCER: It must obviously do. Strange ways of getting into films.
RÓZSA: That's right.
ANNOUNCER: Now, with all the music you've written, and of course, to most people, it's music where they say, oh, yes, saw that film, I remember the music vaguely. Do you find that writing for a film is terribly constricting? I mean, obviously, you have to write so many minutes and so many seconds of a certain theme. And I guess a lot of people say, well, this must be very difficult for a writer. It must limit his ability to be creative.
RÓZSA: No, I don't think it does limit the creative ability, if you have any. It only restricts you in a way, but there is a German saying that the master shows himself in its restrictions. In other words, you are a master when you have to express yourself under more difficult conditions than usual. In other words, if you write a piece of symphonic or chamber music, you create your own form. In film, this is hardly possible because you are following the action. But an opera composer does exactly the same, or an oratorio composer, in other words, anything dramatic. You have an action written by somebody else. The only exception was Wagner, who wrote his own libretti. But you are following something musically that has been predetermined by somebody else. Let's take just one example: Bizet's Carmen, where the libretto was based on a famous novel of Mallarmé and so on and so forth. He was all right. Didn't he write a good opera? Quite a pleasant one.
ANNOUNCER: Quite a pleasant one and rather successful.
RÓZSA: Not bad, yes. Well, so that answers that objection fairly well, I feel.
ANNOUNCER: Have you ever, and this is rather asking you to probably give tales away from school, but in your opinion, have you ever saved a film with your music? Being honest about it, a film that has been slow in action visually and there's drag for dialogue, have you ever felt that you contributed enough to lift it up out of the rut and save it from being a bore?
RÓZSA: No. No. If a film is no good, if it's, as you say, rotten and a bore, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony wouldn't make it better. But if the film has possibilities, if it has possibilities to create, to improve an atmosphere, to point out the drama, to underline the dialogue with music, then I would say music is a part of the building elements. And there's one film of which my music is recorded the most and played the most, and that's Spellbound.
ANNOUNCER: I was going to ask you about this. Now, there's no doubt you were the first to use electronic music in a score, weren't you?
RÓZSA: Yes, yes.
ANNOUNCER: Well, now, with that film, where the music does add so much to the tension, did you actually work hand in glove with Hitchcock, or did you come along after he'd cut the film?
RÓZSA: I came when the picture was completely finished, and there was actually a so-called preview score in it with music from old pictures, assembled just to put in something. And I had to go to a little town close to Hollywood, Pasadena, where they had a preview. Mr. Selznick, who was the producer, wanted me to see the picture there and tell him afterwards whether I liked it or not and I want to write the music or not. I liked it enormously. And actually, the love theme, which is rather well known and has been recorded innumerable times, just came to me on that moment when I saw the picture in Pasadena at that theatre. The electronic music was my idea, though Mr. Hitchcock said that he would like to have an unusual sound. And that was all we talked about. I saw him only once in the office of Mr. Selznick.
ANNOUNCER: What about afterwards?
RÓZSA: Well, this is now 27 years later. I still don't know whether he liked my music or not.
ANNOUNCER: He paid you, though, did he?
RÓZSA: Uh, Selznick did. Hitchcock didn't. He didn't pay me the compliment to write me a letter saying Dear Mr. Rózsa, your music was rotten or good. Nothing.
ANNOUNCER: That sounds incredible, because, I mean, the music is such an important part of a movie. To think that a director of his caliber would be just, you know, well, he obviously must have enjoyed it, there's no question of that, but he was sort of diffident about it.
RÓZSA: Well, I never saw him again.
ANNOUNCER: Isn't that amazing?
RÓZSA: I would meet Mr. Hitchcock and ask him the first question. Shall we leave music in Spellbound or do you want to remove it? (Laughing)
ANNOUNCER: Well, if he's in Australia, I think it's a fair question and we'll try and track him down and ask him if he's going through it.
RÓZSA: Would you do that for me?
ANNOUNCER: What's your favourite out of your film scores?
RÓZSA: Well, maybe Ben-Hur. It has had the greatest scope and every kind of emotion that you can imagine: big marches and very tender love scenes and religion – anything you want.
ANNOUNCER: All right, thank you very much for talking to us.
RÓZSA: A pleasure.