Miklós Rózsa

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风格: #原声　#电影原声
地区: Hungary 匈牙利

艺人介绍

Miklos Rozsa (1907,4,18 ~ 1995,7,27) 出身匈牙利首都布达佩斯的大地主家庭，从小就在极其奢华且具文化气息的环境下长大。其母亲是钢琴家，曾师从李斯特的学生；父亲也是音乐爱好者，热爱匈牙利民歌。Rozsa 5岁开始学小提琴，以后也学了中提琴和钢琴。他8岁就会演奏莫扎特小提琴协奏曲而被视为音乐神童，因此他接受正统古典音乐的训练，师从 Bartok, Kodaly 等人。Rozsa 也曾在郊区的别墅附近搜集了不少匈牙利民歌素材。和 Fritz Reiner, George Szell, Georg Solti 等名指挥家算是同乡且背景相似，后来另一个共同点是二战时都流亡到西方国家。　　　　1925 年，18 岁的 Rozsa 不大喜欢留在布达佩斯，遂前往德国进入莱比锡大学攻读化学，但是 Hermann Grabner 游说 Rozsa 的父亲表示他的天赋适合全职攻读音乐。他进入了莱比锡音乐学院，并师从 Hermann Grabner 。天赋过人的 Rozsa 在1929 年以优等成绩获得学位后才确定走向音乐创作的路线。这时他的创作重心仍以小提琴的协奏曲和奏鸣曲为主（此时他出版了弦乐三充奏，作品编号1，和钢琴五重奏，作品编号2），1931 年他毕业后感觉德国反犹太势力高涨，因此改前往巴黎发展，在巴黎他认识了 Richard Strauss 和 Ernst Donanyi，他们非常赏识他的作品，让 Rozsa 对自己的小提琴作品更有信心。在巴黎他创作了一些管弦乐作品，获受好评，著名指挥家 Charles Munch，Karl Bohm，Georg Solti，Eugene Ormandy 和 Leonard Bernstein 等皆有演出过这些作品。

但是 1934 年一件偶发事件却影响他后半生的方向，当时欧洲电影刚有声化没多久，法国导演 Jacques Feyder 请他为电影 Knight without Armour 配乐，刚开始 Rozsa 意愿不高，只把它当作副业，有个趣闻是传说 Rozsa 迷上了这部片女主角 Marlene Dietrich (中译：玛琳黛德丽，一个传闻 60 岁时稍为化妆一下还能演 30 岁角色的美女) 才决定投入此工作，不过后来这部片票房大获成功，加上欧陆纳粹势力高涨，Rozsa 将工作重心转往伦敦加入了 London Film Production。

到了 1940 年二次大战爆发，London Film Production 老板 Alexander Korda 决定将公司搬到美国西岸的 Hollywood，身为犹太人的 Rozsa 只能选择一起前往美国，到了完全陌生的美国，使得 Rozsa 后半生投入原先只拿来当副业的电影配乐工作。

Rozsa 前往美国之后重心转向电影配乐工作，他深厚的音乐基础挥洒起来绰绰有余，1944 年他为一部投资不大的侦探电影《双重保险》 (Double Indemnity) 配乐时，这部片的制片人 Billy Wilder 等人惊呼 "这根本不是该在这里出现的音乐，这应该在 Carnegie Hall 演奏的！" ，1947 年 Rozsa 约满后马上被经费最充足擅长拍大场面电影的米高梅 (MGM) 公司挖角。

Rozsa 遇到米高梅公司有如千里马遇到伯乐，他最著名的几部作品都出现在接下来和米高梅 12 年的合约时期里，例如：《宾汉》 (Ben-Hur)，《暴君焚城录》 (Quo Vadis)，《劫后英雄传》(Ivanhoe)，《凯撒传》(Julius Caesar)，《梵谷传》 (Lust for Life) 和《福尔摩斯的私生活》(The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes) 。Miklos Rozsa的音乐带有相当浓厚的匈牙利色彩，并富于浪漫激情。晚年的Miklos Rozsa在美国加利福尼亚州教授音乐。他出版过自传：《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.

Miklós Rózsa

艺人介绍

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