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There wasn't much of a "Roman genre" before QV, was there? Most of the famous films were silents. Had there been any substantial Roman Empire stories in the forties? So what exactly did Rozsa alter? The next question is how much he influenced his successors. Would The Robe, The Silver Chalice, Demetrius, etc., have been significantly different without MR's example? It seems to me that Newman and Waxman found their own stylistic approaches. It's an interesting question.

The only American Roman epics prior to QUO VADIS were DeMille's SIGN OF THE CROSS (1932) and CLEOPATRA (1933), and the Merian C. Cooper-Ernest Schoedsack THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII (1935). The first film's score was credited to Rudolph Kopp (with apparent uncredited contributions by Milan Roder, Jay Chernis, and Paul Marquardt), though there's absolutely nothing memorable about the music (whereas Kopp's agreeably languid, mesmerizing music for CLEOPATRA is quite the opposite [and not terribly dissimilar, in its way, from what John Scott would compose for the Charlton Heston-directed ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA forty-one years later], though it barely makes a nod in the direction of its 1st Century BCE Roman-Egyptian locale). As for POMPEII, its music was written by Roy Webb, though one would think it was a natural fit with Max Steiner, who seemed to have a lock on scoring the Cooper-Schoedsack product at RKO. More's the pity that Steiner didn't get a crack at it, as its turgid 19th century Bulwer-Lytton dramaturgy and Steiner seemed made for each other.

On a different note, the below was sent to me by Jim Breig, who unearthed this review by Howard Taubman of an April 2, 1958, performance of Rózsa's Concerto for String Orchestra by the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall (along with works by Prokofiev, Mendelssohn and Rochberg):

"Ormandy offered first New York performances of pieces by George Rochberg, a 39-year-old American; Miklos Rosza [sic], who was born in Hungary almost 51 years ago and now resides in Hollywood; and Serge Prokofieff, who needs no introduction."

He went on: "Mr. Rozsa's Concerto for Strings could not raise anyone's temperature. It is glib, eclectic stuff, slickly assembled but without any compelling impulse. It makes a pretty sound, and the Philadelphia strings took advantage of that."



Taubman was, of course, entitled to dismiss Rózsa's piece (no one's artistic pursuits please everyone), and at least he didn't disparage it as "movie music in the concert hall."

The musical thinking in this score is a canny and powerful blend of the abstract and the cinematic.

I don't think that Rózsa Would've been too pleased with the last part, but it begs the question as to whether working in a particularly exacting and constricting medium like film-scoring actually did make him a better composer for the concert hall, a worse one, or whether he compartmentalized his work in each of the two media that neither affected the other, for better or worse.

And one wonders whether the reviewer, Mr Kosman, was wrinig from a vantage point of having heard recordings of Rózsa's Violin Concerto (perhaps Robert McDuffue's) before hearing it at the concert, or whether it was an all-new piece to him.