Greetings all!  Today marks the 100th birthday of Hungarian-born film composer Mikos Rozsa (d. 1995). 

Rozsa was one of the great Golden Age composers in Hollywood and is known, and most remembered, for two distinct film score types.  Rozsa's early musical career found him creating a distinct musical backdrop to film noirs.  Though he received some notice for the semi-literate fantasy film The Thief of Bagdad (1940) it would be his score for 1944's Double Indemnity that would lead to Rozsa's scoring many of the films in the film noir crime wave.  His music hightened the tensions casting appropriate musical shadows where needed and providing the occasional soaring thematic tissue that lifted even the worst of these films to a new level.  He followed in 1945 with the Hitchcock classic Spellbound and created a new kind of musical accompaniment using the theremin to simulate the psychological aspects of the film and coincidentally asserting the use of this electronic instrument in music beyond horror or science fiction B-film status.  (Though Hitchcock didn't like it.)  Subsequent 1940s films like The Killers and The Asphalt Jungle added a level of harsher harmonic backdrops with equally violent sounding music with acerbic rhythmic punctuations.  Rozsa would use part of a theme from The Killers as the signature for the 1960s TV series theme for Dragnet.

The 1950s began a series of historical dramas and romantic films, most notably Ivanhoe (1952).  (It is not to say that Rozsa was not composing scores for similar films earlier, but that these were the ones that began to illustrate a newer direction in his choice of projects.

Then in 1959, Rozsa provided music for the biblical epic drama Ben-Hur.  This particular score was one of the very first film scores that had a long life outside of the film in numerous concert and recorded versions.  It was important because the selections from the score were not in any way connected to a theme that had been crafted into a commercial song.  It lifted film music out of the context of its individual film and helped many to become more aware of the music that played beneath their favorite films.  The score received an Oscar in 1960.

Rozsa's next project was the equally exhaustive King of Kings  (1961).  Even though the film essentially was the same period story as Ben-Hur, Rozsa managed to craft an equally fascinating score trying to find a sound that could be as faithful to the period as could be allowable for the time. 

The musical landscape was changing even by this time and Rozsa took on fewer projects as the decade wore on.  Younger fans could revel in his music in the 1970s with three fine scores.  The fantasy score for 1974's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad found the composer back in the earlier part of his career again.  In 1979 he wrote a fascinating score for Time After Time which mixed a little of the classic fantasy style with some of the dramatic thriller style.  And his final commercial film was Carl Reiner's parody of film noirs, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982) which reference many of the films Rozsa had scored forty years prior.  It remains as one of his most requested scores to be released and maybe we will get that someday!

Rozsa wrote several concerti and other concert pieces some of which have been released off an on over the past few years.

John Williams actually paid homage to Rozsa in his score Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999).  The whole sequence with the big race, preceded by the processional of the flags on the field, identified on the CD release and in concert versions as "The Flag Parade," is a visual nod to the same sequence from Ben-Hur called "Parade of the Charioteers."