Miklós Rózsa Answers 20 Questions
Ken Doeckel sent 20 questions to Miklós Rózsa on tape, with Rózsa replying in the same manner at his home in Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy. This tape was made July 7, 1977 by Dr. Rózsa. The tape was later misplaced for about a year and a half, but it was eventually recovered and remastered April 18th, 1979. Of this project, Ken said: "One of the questions I've long wanted to ask Dr. Rózsa is to state his 15 favorite films which he prefers musically, and get him to list them chronologically rather than in order of preference. Then I asked him to list which five of the 15 he most enjoyed composing, and to also list them chronologically. I hope you enjoy listening to Dr. Rózsa. I think he's our greatest living composer, and certainly one of the greatest composers who ever lived."
These questions were transcribed from an audio file with an AI-assisted audio program. The original file contained 20 questions, but I was not supplied with the actual questions which were written out, so I had to do some guesswork as to what they were with some help and also where they went in the copy. One of these questions, which had to do with Rózsa's children, is not included; this still allowed me to have 20 questions. The text has been edited, which included some transpositions.
- M.Q.
1. DID YOU ALWAYS WANT TO BE A COMPOSER?
I became a composer because from a very early age I knew that this is all I can do in life. Apart from my training, even before my training, I composed music rather than doing algebra or geometry or subjects I hated in school. I orchestrated during my classes, and from my 15th year on, I would say, I just lived for and in music. Obviously, I knew that there is nothing else for me. It's a beautiful life. It's a free life. If you make it.
With due modesty, just thinking of all the Miklós Rózsa societies around the world, I think I made it! And how? I worked. Why did I work? Because I just had to. Why did I have to? Because I just cannot do anything else. For me, composing music is just like eating and drinking for someone else. That is my normal function in life, that I get up in the morning and work. It's absolutely unimportant whether this is now film scores, whether this is choral music, orchestral music, chamber music, or even if I have to write a popular song in the vein of the 1940s. I had to do four of those for a recent film to be heard in the background, and I had no idea how to do it, but I had to do it. And this has been absolutely unimportant. It doesn't matter, but that's what I do. And with that, you have a satisfied life. You do what you want, and it keeps you going. And this is the main thing. That is why I very often am bitter about the fact that composers are terribly badly paid. I'm not talking about film composers, of course, any kind of commercial work, for which you're getting paid well, but of serious music. To make a living like that, it's a complete impossibility. A few composers who wrote music for the stage, like Verdi, Massenet, Wagner and Strauss, they made a very comfortable living. But apart from that, if you wait to make a living on the few sonatas you have written, I can assure you that is an impossibility. So you have to do something else, and something else is mostly teaching, teaching young people how not to make a living with the stuff you are teaching them.
I taught for 20 years at the University of Southern California, and I had about 15 pupils, which would make 300 pupils. And of the 300, not more than about five have made it. And only one became really famous [Jerry Goldsmith]. That shows you clearly what a difficult profession it is. I had very talented pupils who became teachers. I had less talented ones that knew the right people. They succeeded. So it is very difficult to say.
The other day I read a résumé of the life of the great Hungarian violinist and teacher, Jenő Hubay. He was a teacher, and not only in Hungary because he had pupils from all around the world, including American ones, and he cites very triumphantly just towards the end of his life, and it was a long life during which he taught, I would say taught 50 years, he had about five to six outstanding students. By outstanding I mean that they became world-renowned violin virtuosos, and for the American audience I only could name one, and that is Joseph Szigeti. There are another five, six names which were known in Europe in their time, but that's all.
Zoltan Kodály was teaching well over 30 years, maybe even 40. I would say easily he taught many pupils at the Academy in Hungary, and he had the best of the crop of Hungarian talents. What is the result? Name me one present Hungarian composer who is world renowned as a composer and a pupil of Kodály. None. So, very few made it.
You have to face facts. If you are a composer, you have to do something that keeps you going, and that is so-called commercial music, and in our time this means films, which after all can have great artistic expression, and you can write, if you are in a position, anything you want, and you are getting decently paid for it, and you have time then to write your own music as well. Now why don't Hollywood composers write more of their so-called own music? Well, the answer is very simple, because they have no "own music." Very few. I hate to say anything bad about my colleagues. After all, I was president of the Screen Composers Association for ten years, but I have seen that for them, or let's say 99% of them, films are just a way to make a living and they are supplying music for films as a commodity.
2. WHAT TYPICALLY DID YOU DO WHEN YOU WERE SCORING A FILM?
Before I started a film, I made innumerable sketches, just the same way as I make sketches for any serious compositions. Themes, ideas, for weeks. And actually, when I have three, four, or sometimes even six pages written full of these short ideas, sometimes two bars, sometimes eight bars, ten bars, sometimes just a melodic line, sometimes harmonized, then I had my basic material. From then on, the work was much easier because you don't fish for ideas when you have already a supply of it. And I am a great changer of themes. I think this is the only thing I have common with Beethoven, who went through agonies for days, months, sometimes years and changed his themes around, an interval, a bar line, a harmony, as we have seen from his sketchbooks. Things have been altered many, many, many times until he finally got what he wanted. Very much so with Rembrandt, especially with his etchings you can see many times harmony in the different states how much he changed he took a figure back, the way he added something to it or he changed the expression. I envy the composer or the writer or painter who just sits down and does it immediately and that's it – for instance like Mozart – but there the other kinds of artists who are fighting with the elements. Michelangelo was one like that. And I very well understand this fight because it's very necessary.
When scoring a film and I got to the recording stage I had total control. Then comes the beautiful moment when you hear your music and a symphony orchestra of eighty is doing their best to give all the expression and going to all the dynamics from piano to fortissimo and then it is dubbed in a picture usually at a level that a string quartet would be much stronger playing with mutes. This is something that I had no control over. When I was still with M-G-M, it was expected that the composer goes to the dubbing session. However, when a reel was dubbed, the producer or a representative came in and the usual comment was the music is too loud. I have never heard one executive came in and would have said raise the music here or there. The music is kept down to a bare minimum – it disturbs them. They still don't understand their function. There are very few people who do, and actually I must say that even my recent film Providence is very badly dubbed too, because where there are long silences, the music does play a very important part, and I agree this is a dream, a dream you don't hear a complete symphony orchestra playing for you. But it should be absolutely 100% understandable what they play but I think it's only 50% that remains. However this 50% apparently impresses people so I cannot complain. In the past, I have complained about the song mania in films and I'm 100% against them. I mean this is again sheer cheap commercialism and if we want to elevate the film art to a level then we have to do an artistic work regardless whether it will make money – it's a by-product.
I'm talking now about whether this by-product is going to produce extra money for the company or not; it has very often been proved that with a theme song sung at the beginning with the main titles and every inopportune moment by somebody, they actually ruined the film. They have ruined many films. But this was the trend as I had to deal with at M-G-M and once when I was asked to do this, I used a chorus [in Green Fire]. But I think it belongs now to the past, I hope, and this is one reason I was against the musical methods of Dimitri Tiomkin. It was because he revived this approach which started in 1927, with Al Jolson, The Jazz Singer. I remember as a kid I saw this picture and everybody was singing "Sonny Boy" and "Mammy." Now this was a great thing, but in every film there had to be a song. And this was a theme song, this had to be played from beginning to end, and that's why there was no serious and effective dramatic music in films whatsoever. It was only commercialism to make money. And it has another reason, especially in France. In France, for instance, the production company has no budget whatsoever for the composer. This is taken over by a publisher. The publisher is paying the orchestra, the hall, and so on. And all the music costs for this are getting the so-called publishing share, actually for publishing nothing. And naturally this man or this company wants to make some money, and if there is a song in the film and they can make separate money on this, well, all the better for them. But what has that to do with art?
It is very sad, but maybe there is just such a metier as the film composer. But I don't think it could and never would satisfy me. It never has. Even in years when I had to make five, six films a year, I found sometimes, somehow to do one or at least one piece for myself. And well, that is the secret of my life, or if you want to call it my double life. I again cannot comment on this a lot because I see very few of the present day films and the ones I'm doing, a few I am doing occasionally, I'm doing it the same way as I always did, and there is not too much music in it. I do believe that music should be only there when it is needed. It is a very difficult question actually for a composer, because very often you feel that there is absolutely no music needed here, but either the producer or the director asked for it. And what do you say? If you say, no, I don't want it or don't see it, they would think, oh, he doesn't want to do it because he wants to save himself the work. He's getting paid anyway. So you agree. At least I do, unless I feel very strongly about it. But when I feel that it doesn't need it, and they do, I say, "Well, all right. All right, I'll write it." And I just hate the idea that somebody thinks that I want to get out of some work for which I'm very well paid.
3. WHAT WAS THE HOLLYWOOD FILM MUSIC SCENE LIKE WHEN YOU CAME TO AMERICA?
Hollywood music, when it started, was not the highest caliber. The composers who worked in Hollywood in the early days of the sound film were not composers. They were mostly show conductors, either in Broadway or in cinemas. Their training was, how shall I say, incomplete. They had talent, otherwise they wouldn't have been there. They had something, but that was not composition. Very few, and I wouldn't know who, had a thorough conservatory or university education as a composer. It's not enough to pick up a few elementary harmony lessons. It is not enough to have heard a few concerts. But as a composer, you have to be trained thoroughly, the same way as a doctor has to be trained to practice medicine or an architect has to be paid to build a house which should not collapse after the first year. Unfortunately our Hollywood composers were not this kind. They drifted into the compositions because they had to. All they did up to now, and I'm talking for a great percentage of these, there might have been exceptions if they were, I didn't know them. They were "compilators." They worked for the cinema, they had a certain dramatic sense, and they could put together scores from the classics, from the Romantics, and so forth, but they were not composers.
The Hollywood establishment music when I came there, to my mind at least, was absolutely atrocious. It was a pastiche of just what the producer would have liked to hear. The producers, the directors had very little to say in these things. My encounter with Billy Wilder was an exception. The producer was responsible to the head of the studio who was just as unmusical as anybody can be and all they liked, they knew what they liked and what they liked the public likes. That was the motto. And the result was the clichés that you have heard a thousand times, that's what they wanted. There were successful composers like Max Steiner, like Newman, like Victor Young, and with the exception of Newman, who had of course much more talent than all the others put together, they wrote sort of a Hollywood cinematographic style, which was largely based on Rachmaninoff, of Broadway tunes, and the obvious dramatic clichés.
You can't blame the fact that this kind of music which invaded not only America but the whole world was not represented by serious composers. Let's take New York as a random example, where these composers thought they could have done better. Maybe they could have, maybe they couldn't. The only man who came to Hollywood and was very successful was Aaron Copland. And you say that they don't resent his excursion to Hollywood. No, because he was quite an established name before, and he did only about three or four pictures [actually eight], and not very consequential ones, with maybe the exception of one or two. And he did not make Hollywood history with his music. So this was more or less forgotten and forgiven. So Aaron Copland's reputation did not suffer that he wrote music for Hollywood films, and he's a very important and a very great composer, and I thought that his scores for Hollywood were also outstanding.
4. DID YOU GET ALONG WITH PEOPLE YOU WORKED WITH DURING YOUR CAREER SO FAR?
There were many directors and producers I worked with, but not many were knowledgeable, musically speaking. To work with Billy Wilder was always an unquestionable pleasure. He is very erudite, very intelligent, very sensitive, a true artist. And he very often has musical ideas. In other words, he knows what kind of music he would like. Sometimes it's difficult for him to express it in musical terms, but we always work together. And I believe in this, to work together with the director – after, all the whole picture is his dream. He dreamt up the scenes, the scenario, and everything what you see, and why shouldn't we work closely together? He used to come to my office in London when we were working on [The Private Life of] Sherlock Holmes, or he came to my home, and I played the score to him on the piano. I explained the scene and then played the music, and then he sometimes had another idea, and if it was good, I certainly accepted it. After all, he knew more about the picture than I did.
For instance, I can give you an example of this: In Sherlock Holmes, there was a famous scene. I think it became famous because it was very nice. When Holmes, Watson, and the girl who later becomes a spy go on a trip in Scotland, Billy said now he would like to have a very Scottish atmosphere. So I got an anthology of Scottish themes, and I wrote a sort of a paraphrase on them, saying to the audience that "Here we are, now we are in Scotland." Well, it was very Scottish indeed, but he didn't like it. I said, "What's the trouble?" "Well," he said, "it's too Scottish." "Well," I said, "you see, you can't be just a little pregnant. If you're Scottish, you're Scottish. This is Scottish. We even have bagpipes in the orchestra." He said, "No, no, no, that takes away from the dramatic action. It becomes just Scotland." Then somebody suggested that because they are bicycling and the song Bicycle Built For Two was a waltz, it should be in a waltz rhythm. Now this was as idiotic as it can be but he came to me and said now could you try it now in waltz rhythm. I said, "But you don't want a Scottish theme." "No, no, let's play the theme of Holmes and play it as a waltz." Now, I did not like this at all, but time was short. I quickly wrote it. There was one more session, and we played it as a waltz. Now, I hated to destroy my theme of the violin concerto as a waltz and I tried to do it as unobtrusively as possible.
Well, we played it with the picture, with the whole orchestra, and again he didn't like it. I said, "Well, now it just goes against the picture." So I told him, "Now, would you mind if I try it another third time? I would like to have it." And he said, "Well, go ahead. We have one session, and it's in two days, but will you have time to write it?" I said, "We have the whole night." I used the girl's theme which is the second movement from the violin concerto in a rather dramatic way, based on an insistent rhythm. And that goes to the whole scene clashing with the bagpipes that we occasionally hear. And many people have remarked that this was probably the most dramatic scene in the whole picture. Now this is collaboration, even if he was not quite right at the beginning, but we were trying to get something that he wanted and I was very willing to cooperate.
For instance, in Double Indemnity, there we wanted a theme for the conspiracy of these two people who were about to kill Mr. Dietrichson. And Wilder had in mind the beginning of the Unfinished Symphony by Schubert. And it sounds silly, but he was absolutely right. In that whole beginning, before the theme starts [Rozsa sings it], and so on. There was a certain hush-hush insistence. Well, I wrote something which has nothing to do with this, of course, musically, but that suggested the idea for this. Great directors who have ideas can suggest something that dramatically can be very valid, and it's up to the composer to solve it musically. I later had that, to a great extent, with John Houseman.
John Houseman is not a director but a producer. But at M-G-M, in the good old days, the producer was a very important man, artistically as well as financially, so to speak. He took over the picture after the director delivered it, and for instance, in pictures like Julius Caesar, Lust for Life, Moonfleet, I did not work with the directors at all. The directors were already gone by the time I got the picture, but there was John Houseman, and he was a very erudite, a very brilliant, creative man. Later he became an actor, and he came very often to the studio. As a matter of fact, when I finished a sequence, I always called him. He came over, and we listened to it together. Usually it was exactly what he wanted, but if he made some suggestions, which I found good, I gladly accepted them. Well, with Alan Renais, it was more or less the same, but as I told you before, he gave me a complete list of where he wanted the music and what kind of a music he wanted. It was very much explained with non-musical terms, which were very clear, and again, all I had to do was translate them into musical terms.
(Click here to read Rózsa's comments on his most recent films at the time, including Providence (1977).)