Miklós Rózsa

Triple Oscar Winning Film Composer

Miklos Rozsa was born in Budapest in 1907 and from an early age demonstrated his mother's same affinity for music. He learned the violin, the viola and the piano and was publicly performing Mozart at the age of 7. A musical career awaited, and he was inspired by Bartok and Liszt among others, and shared their liking for folk music.

While his parents tried to steer him towards a more practical lifestyle, insisting he major in chemistry at the University of Leipzig, it wasn't long before he was enrolled in Leipzig Conservatory, training in musicology, preparing him for a long, successful and influential career in music.

He began scoring films for fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda in England in the 1930s and went with him to Hollywood to make The Thief of Bagdad (1940). Rózsa's work ranges from the The Jungle Book (1942) to the intimate, disturbing accompaniment for Spellbound (1945) to the epic, scores of Julius Caesar (1953), Ben-Hur (1959) and El Cid (1961). For twenty years, from 1945 to 1965, he was a professor at the University of Southern California, teaching and continuing to compose classical works.

It was Rosza who began the vogue for recorded film scores, and he remained the most recorded of film composers for at least 40 years.