Leonard Rosenman

Mar 7 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

IT WAS the age-old dilemma of the choice between taking fame and money or art and status. Composer Leonard Rosenman, who has died, aged 83, of a heart attack, after battling dementia, was regarded as one of serious music’s hot post-war talents, but chose to take the Hollywood dollar and saw his concert hall career immediately collapse.

Yet he was, as they also say, crying all the way to the bank with a double-Oscar win to his credit and numerous A-list films on his composing CV.

Could this son of a Brooklyn grocer really have turned Hollywood down after the young James Dean hammered on his apartment door at 11pm, demanding to be taught piano, after hearing his playing at a party?

Rosenman and Dean became great friends, and the rocketing star introduced him to director Elia Kazan, who hired him in 1954 to score East of Eden. This film of Steinbeck’s novel turned Dean into a legend and Rosenman also scored the star’s Rebel Without A Cause. Would anybody want to miss such assignments for the sniffy approval of Manhattan’s highbrow music salons?

Rosenman persisted with his concert hall career, although he had to wait until 1997 for his work to be performed at Carnegie Hall.

Ironically, it was reworking other composers’ material that gained him the Academy Awards for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), and Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory (1976). He also received Oscar nominations for Cross Creek (1983) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). Other memorable scores were for Richard Harris’s A Man Called Horse and one of the only two films people can remember starring Raquel Welch, Fantastic Voyage (1966).

Rosenman’s film music drew heavily on his avant garde techniques and he is credited with taking film music into a far more contemporary mode.

Previously, the romantic 19th-century orchestral styles dominated. Instead, he used complex, dissonant, atonal and serial music, but could still write lush melodies when needed.

Rosenman’s TV credits won him Emmys for his Sybil and Friendly Fire. He scored highly popular series such as The Defenders, Combat! and Marcus Welby, MD. He is survived by his fourth wife, Judie Gregg, and various children.

Leonard Rosenman,composer; born, September 7, 1924, died, March 4, 2008