Music Composed by Miklós Rósza
Rating: *****

Miklós Rósza will always be most famous for his grandiose biblical epics, but for my money, his best scores will always be his more personal and introspective works. Few scores demonstrate this side of the composer better than The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, his score for Billy Wilder’s frustrated attempt at revealing the personal side of Sherlock Holmes. Wilder’s script was reportedly inspired by Rósza’s Violin Concert, Op. 24, a passionate work that drew heavily from Rozsa’s Hungarian heritage. Accordingly, Wilder asked Rósza to base the heart of his score on the concerto, bringing Privates Life’s relationship with the piece full-circle. The result was a quintessential Rósza masterpiece, binding his own deeply personal Hungarian heritage with his unrivaled mastery at finding the emotional core in each of the films he scored.

The film itself was to be a symphony in four movements, with four episodes that each revealed some new insight into Holmes’ psyche and his relationship with Watson. Unfortunately, when the finished product ran for over four hours, the powers that be opted to cut two of the episodes entirely out of the film, resulting in an extremely uneven symphony of two movements. The result is an intriguing but frustrating affair that opens with a fascinating look into Holmes sexual makeup before streamlining into a standard mystery that only occasionally pauses for personal insight. You would not, however, know that to hear Rósza’s score. For even when the film looses track of its original intent and starts following the plot more closely than the characters, Rósza never looses focus of the underlying personal connections.

Miklós Rósza

In fact, Rósza’s music provides the only fabric that ties all of the film’s disparate thematic ideas together, often using seemingly unrelated ideas from the first episode to influence scenes in the second episode. This is particularly evident in the way he handles the love theme (or the theme from the second movement of the concerto - take your pick). In the first episode, Rósza gives us a chillingly melancholy variation on this theme as Watson pries too far into Holmes sexual history, causing the good detective to withdraw inside himself (the second half of “Watson’s Rage / Being Presumptuous”). Here, Rósza establishes the melody as a representation of Holmes painful and lonely romantic history (this is also a textbook example of using music to tell us things about characters that the characters aren’t willing to tell us themselves). When, however, the mysterious woman Gabrielle appears in the second episode, Rósza uses the same theme for her restrained relationship with the detective (”Gabrielle”). Not only does Rósza’s music demonstrate Holmes’ unexpressed affection for the woman, but it also meaningfully ties this affection to Holmes’ empty sexual past referenced earlier in the first episode. This melody becomes a driving theme for the film as a whole, sometimes featured in straight renditions and sometimes even disguised as action music (”Castles of Scotland/Urquhart Castle”). In the process, Rósza ensures that even when the story seems caught up in the plot-heavy mystery, Holmes’ sexual psyche is always the driving force underlining everything action he takes.

Rósza also uses his concerto to underscore the relationship between Holmes and Watson, revealing complex and painful contours in the friendship in the process. Unfortunately, the most affective episode concerning their relationship ultimately left the film, but Nic Raine has reconstructed the episode’s music for this recording. “The Curious Case of the Upside-Down Room / Pistol Practice” and “Moving Out” make up the music for this episode, in which Watson grows so despaired at watching his friend destroy himself with cocaine that he threatens to sever ties with Holmes for good. Rósza uses the bleaker material from the concerto’s first movement to draw on both Watson’s bitter despair and Holmes’ helplessness. The two eventually reconcile, but the music concludes on an ominous note nevertheless with “Moving Out” (although I suspect that the more upbeat “Pistol Practice” may actually be the ending of the sequence). As this sequence was cut, little of Rósza’s bleak Watson/Holmes music made it to the finished film, but you can here him touch on it briefly in “The Smoke Machine/Concerto/Cocaine.” In this opening scene, Rósza’s restless writing for solo violin gives us hints of a rift in their relationship.

And of course, the score also contains a wealth of thematic material that doesn’t come from the concerto - far too much, in fact, for me to analyze with any more depth. Among the many fully-fleshed ideas, we have an upbeat spirit-of-adventure theme that opens the score (”Main Titles/21B Baker Street”), a regal British pride anthem (”The Diogenes Club”), a menacing King of Kings-flavored hymnal theme for the ominous monks (”Inverness/The Cemetary/Valladon”), furious action music (”The Sighting” - this actually is taken from the concerto, come to think of it), and endless variations on the Scottish folksong “Loch Lomand” for the Scotland scenes (”To Glenhurich” - and in true Rozsa forms, he uses this music to tip us off that Holmes is thinking of Scotland before anything else in the film has given it away). In fact, just about every facet of the composer’s musical persona comes out in some way for this score, making it the quintessential Rósza score.

So as I’m sure everyone’s gathered by now, this is a perfect release in every respect. Once again, I must pay special praise to Nic Raine and The City of Prague Philharmonic. This is their third recording on the Tadlow label, and it manages to surpass even the unenviable heights of their Guns of Navarone and True Grit performances. To be fair, I should acknowledge that the performance here is not at all faithful to the performance in the film. That, however, is because the performance here is significantly better than the performance in the film. I know I’ll get lynched by Rósza purists for saying that (especially when the film had Rósza conducting the LSO), but Raine manages to bring out precision and passion that simply wasn’t in the film recording. This is especially true of Lucie Svehlova, who attacks the virtuoso violin solos with fire and nuance in her phrasing that makes the film’s violinist sound tired and morose by comparison (though note that I am conveniently not comparing her with Heifetz’s original performance on the concerto - I’m not stupid). Of course, Rósza may have wanted a more leisurely and morose performance to compliment the downbeat nature of the story, but as a pure listening experience, Raine’s interpretation is pitch-perfect. Rósza’s centennial has opened quite options for people looking to discover new Rósza, but as far as I’m concerned, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is the best of the lot. It’s one of his finest and most personal film scores, and one of the best performances you’ll ever hear in a film music recording.

Music Composed by Miklós Rósza; Orchestra Conducted by James Fitzpatrick; Score Reconstructions and Orchestrations by Nic Raine; Recording Engineer: Jan Holzner; Produced by James Fitzpatrick; Label: Tadlow Music, (Tadlow004); Availability: Limited; U.S. Release Date: May, 2007.

01. Main Titles/221B Baker Street (4:15)
02. The Smoke Machine/Concerto/Cocaine (2:12)
03. The Curious Case Of The Upside-Down Room/Pistol Practice (5:32)
04. Moving Out (2:54)
05. Watson’s Rage/Being Presumptuous (2:22)
06. Von Tirpitz Appears (1:50)
07. Gabrielle (5:17)
08. No.32 Ashdown St./Canaries (4:15)
09. The Rambunctious Canary (2:36)
10. The Diogenes Club (1:29)
11. To Glenhurich (Loch Lomond Arr. Rozsa)/The Parasol (2:26)
12. Inverness/The Cemetery/Valladon (5:46)
13. The Sighting (1:02)
14. Castles Of Scotland/Urquhart Castle (5:29)
15. After The Monster/The Monster Strikes (5:02)
16. The Last Act (2:07)
17. Ilse Von Hoffmanstal/A Certain Royal Personage/Gabrielle’s Awakening (3:28)
18. Holmes’ Morse Code/Eternal Silence/Farewell (3:49)
19. Auf Wiedersehen/The End (5:20)
20. Castles Of Scotland - Version 1 (1:54)
21. Castles Of Scotland - Version 2 (Vienna In Scotland) (2:10)
22. Castles Of Scotland - Final Version With Bagpipe Drones (2:06)
23. Main Titles/221B Baker Street - Original Version (4:26)

Total Playing Time: 77:47