A noble film music fan from Scotland (who prefers to remain anonymous...) sent me an article from Aug.-Sept. 1971, 'Sound Track'/'Films in Review' which quotes extensively from the Rozsa letter of '67, written to the famed Page Cook, where he comments on his replacement:

'.... I had a contract with Paramount for 'Judith', a romantic adventure tale with Sophia Loren and Peter Finch. Suddenly an offer came from Rome to score 'The Bible'. I felt that this might be the crowning work of my 'Biblical period' and was anxious to score the film. Paramount reluctantly let me out of my contract. The agents called from Rome, confirmed the deal but told me that they had difficulties getting the customary living expenses for the period of my contract with producer Dino de Laurentiis. I waited. Two weeks later I found out that they had engaged a jazz arranger, Ennio Morricone, as a 'try out'. He wrote one sequence which was recorded, but they didn't like it. I was cabled everything would work out. In the meantime, the film's director, John Huston, had heard a record of music from the film 'Tokyo Olympiad' and decided that was what he wanted. Said the Irish genius: 'It has a new sound, like the voice of silence'. They approached the Japanese embassy in Rome in order to ferret out the Japanese Beethoven, and got Toshiro Mayuzumi. I wasn't even told they were sorry I had lost 'Judith' because of their irresponsibility. As Mayuzumi had no name value they also engaged Goffredo Petrassi, a fine Italian composer, and divided the score between them. First, Petrassi's music was recorded with a huge orchestra. It was beyond their understanding, and they sent Mr. Petrassi packing. The Japanese genius, who wrote what they wanted, completed the score alone, borrowing from every style of every musical epoch.'

The context of the overall article is a discussion of replaced or quashed scores, with the replaced scores generally lauded as the more valid. Cook refers to 'Lawrence of Arabia' as 'that over-rated film' (!!!!!!) and there's more than a hint of chagrin in the whole tone of the piece, which of course Rozsa does nothing to dispel.

I'm interested in the overall judgemental feel of Rozsa's comments here. We've all heard (some at first hand) of his intolerance for other musical philosophies re scoring, and in this case there's the obviously considerable loss he incurred in dropping a contract for an assignment he'd been more or less promised. Do we feel however that he was being objective or fair in his assessment of Mayuzumi's talents? I don't see that score as a hotchpotch of period styles, maybe nowadays postmodern, but certainly utilising all the period cliches Rozsa himself would enlist. And what does he mean about Huston, when he quips, 'Irish genius'? In CONTEXT it looks like an interesting put-down.

In the final analysis it looks as though Huston employed very reasonable artistic criteria to this film. As posts above point out, the score worked, and nothing would have sunk Rozsa's career faster in the '60s than a, 'theme for every character', Satan in the trombones affair, with a Mickey-Mouse passage to describe Noah's flood, no matter how authentically Hebraic the modal content. Did he really understand this? Maybe just a TEENY bit more open-mindedness and he'd've weathered the 60s like Goldsmith, Bernstein etc.?