ABSTRACT
Of all the twentieth-century composers who wrote music both for the concert stage and for films, it was perhaps Miklós Rózsa (1907–95) who was most insistent that these two creative spheres remain separate. The title of his 1982 autobiography (Double Life) foregrounds this separation, which was central to Rózsa’s sense of himself as a composer. Indeed, Rózsa’s concert music oeuvre was in many ways defined by what it was not (that is to say, film music). For these works, Rózsa favoured generic titles (e.g. ‘Violin Concerto’ or ‘String Quartet’) that reinforced their connection to the idea of abstract music that was so central to the tradition of European art music, and many of them display a conscious engagement with the formal patterns and motivic development that film music was often understood to lack. Yet the borders that shaped Rózsa’s career were by no means impermeable. His Spellbound Concerto – based on his score for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound – straddled the division between film and concert music. So did his score for Billy Wilder’s 1970 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which – based as it is on his 1953 Violin Concerto – crosses the border by moving, we might say, in the opposite direction.
