[2] Best known for his nearly one hundred film scores, he nevertheless maintained a steadfast allegiance to absolute concert music throughout what he called his "double life".
The latter project brought him to Hollywood when production was transferred from wartime Britain, and Rózsa remained in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1946.
During his Hollywood career, he received 17 Academy Award nominations including three Oscars for Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1947), and Ben-Hur (1959), while his concert works were championed by such major artists as Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky, and János Starker.
Like his father, and despite his landowning status, Gyula had socialist leanings, which he expressed in a pamphlet entitled To Whom Does the Hungarian Soil Belong?
Rózsa's maternal uncle Lajos Berkovits, violinist with the Budapest Opera, presented young Miklós with his first instrument at the age of five.
While deeply admiring the folk-based nationalism of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, Rózsa sought to find his own way as a composer.
Fearing that Kodály's dominance at Budapest's Franz Liszt Academy tended to suppress individualism, he sought to study music in Germany.
Neither work was published, and Rózsa was discouraged on a trip to Berlin when Wilhelm Furtwängler did not find time to consider the Symphony.
For a time he remained in Leipzig as Grabner's assistant, but at the suggestion of the French organist and composer Marcel Dupré, he moved to Paris in 1931.
Richard Strauss was in the audience, and his approval meant more to the young composer than the presence of Habsburg royalty and the prince regent, Miklós Horthy.
13, was especially well received and was performed by conductors such as Charles Munch, Karl Böhm, Georg Solti, Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein.
However, no film scoring opportunities presented themselves in Paris, and Rózsa had to support himself by reliance on a wealthy patron and by composing light music under the pseudonym Nic Tomay.
It was not until Rózsa moved to London that he was hired to compose his first film score for Knight Without Armour (1937), produced by his fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda.
[1] Around the same time he also scored Thunder in the City (1937) for another Hungarian filmmaker, Ákos Tolnay, who had previously urged Rózsa to come to England.
[1] Korda and the studio's music director, Muir Mathieson, brought Rózsa onto their Arabian Nights fantasy The Thief of Bagdad (1940) when the operetta-style approach of the original composer, Oscar Straus, was deemed unsuitable.
Numerous changes were made in the editing by Audray Granville, Selznick's assistant and de facto music director.
Rózsa's pioneering (for Hollywood) use of the theremin contributed to the effect, and the attention it generated likely influenced his Academy Award nomination.
Rózsa eventually arranged his themes as the Spellbound Concerto, which (in multiple versions) has enjoyed lasting success in concerts and recordings.
For The Killers (1946) he wrote an ominous rhythmic figure that later became famous as the "dum-da-dum-dum" signature theme of the radio and television program Dragnet.
That same year Rózsa and Eugene Zador arranged music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for the film Song of Scheherazade, about a fictional episode in the composer's early life.
For this massive production, Hollywood's most expensive film to that date, Rózsa went back to ancient Greek sources in an effort to simulate the music of antiquity.
Roger Hickman describes it as "the last universally acknowledged score created in the classical Hollywood tradition prior to Star Wars (1977) .
13, introduced in Duisburg, Germany, in 1934 and soon taken up by Charles Munch, Karl Böhm, Bruno Walter, Hans Swarowsky, and other leading conductors.
It was first played in the United States by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Hans Lange on October 28–29, 1937, and achieved wide exposure through a 1943 New York Philharmonic concert broadcast when Leonard Bernstein made his famous conducting debut.
The commissioning artists, Heifetz and his frequent collaborator Gregor Piatigorsky, never performed the finished work, although they did record a reduced version of the slow movement, called Tema con Variazoni, Op.
His collaboration with conductor Maurice Skones and The Choir of the West at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, resulted in a commercial recording of his sacred choral works—To Everything There is a Season, Op.
In the Tom Clancy novel Red Rabbit, a fictional cousin of Rózsa's, "Jozsef Rozsa", appears as a minor character who is famous in-universe as a conductor of classical music.