Considered by many to be the greatest score ever written, Miklós Rózsa's music for William Wyler's 212-minute epic Ben-Hur (1959) is an awe-inspiring creation of great beauty. Rózsa was given one year to complete his score, and the extra time shows in the score's quality. Of the three Oscars that he won, Rózsa always claimed that Ben-Hur was the most meaningful. Having researched ...
Miklos Rozsa was one of the musical giants of Hollywood's golden age. By the time he signed on with M-G-M for what he called his "fourth phase," a successful series of historically themed costume dramas that included Quo Vadis (whose musical tracks are still lost) and Ben-Hur, the Hungarian-born composer had already written music for a disparate collection of films, including The ...
The undisputed king of the epic, Rózsa's music exudes endless grandeur. As this collection's title acknowledges, it will always be with Ben Hur that he's most inseparably associated. The sheer scale of the project coupled with his impossibly brilliant fanfares and processionals keep it above the numerous other historical epics in his career. Others spread across the two discs include El ...