Double Life

Rating:
Summary: Double Life, Singular Talent
Review: Miklos Rozsa, Hungarian-born composer (1907-1995), confesses in these pages that he never much liked the cinema, though somehow, he almost effortlessly managed to enrich it with an endless flow of melodies, at turns romantic, spine-chilling, or thrilling. All his music derived from the Magyar folk songs he sought and catalogued in his youth, and this grounding enabled him to do something which few of his contemporaries understood -- and which almost none of the current crop of "film composers" understand: how to tell a dramatic story in music, a third level beyond the images and words we typically think of as being the sum of the "talking motion picture." Rozsa's first love was his so-called "absolute music," that written for the concert hall (which includes his Violin Concerto in D, Op. 24, one of the 20th Century's most ravishingly beautiful compositions); his work for Hollywood's major film studios merely paid the bills, so he claimed, allowing him the luxury of writing personal music without having to starve for the privilege, as have many talented composers and artists before and since. Though Rozsa remained resolutely Old World, with Hungarian his first language, his is an engaging memoir of the long-gone feudal kingdoms, princes and foot-soldiers of Hollywood's Golden Age, whose walls he entered and paths he crossed, inluding producers Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, actors Burt Lancaster and Elizabeth Taylor, and directors Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and William Wyler...as well as memorable names -- some infamous -- outside the worlds of music and film, such as Aldous Huxley, Pope Pius XII, and even Adolf Hitler. "A Double Life" is, in all, a valuable document of a thoughtful man's life and the fascinating world he inhabited.