Bernard Herrmann
Bernard Herrmann was an American composer and conductor best known for his work in film scoring. As a conductor, he championed the music of lesser-known composers. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest film composers. Alex Ross writes that "Over four decades, he revolutionized movie scoring by abandoning the illustrative musical techniques that dominated Hollywood in the 1930s and imposing his own peculiar harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary."
An Academy Award-winner for The Devil and Daniel Webster, Herrmann worked in radio drama, composing for Orson Welles's The Mercury Theater on the Air, and his first film score was for Welles's film debut, Citizen Kane. He is known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, notably The Man Who Knew Too Much , Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds and Marnie . His other credits include Jane Eyre, Anna and the King of Siam, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Cape Fear, Fahrenheit 451 and Twisted Nerve. Herrmann scored films that were inspired by Hitchcock, like François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black and Brian De Palma's Sisters and Obsession. He composed the scores for several fantasy films by Ray Harryhausen, and composed for television, including Have Gun – Will Travel and Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. His last score, recorded shortly before his death, was for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.
Early life and career
Herrmann was born in New York City as Maximillian Herman, the son of a Jewish middle-class family of Russian origin. He was the son of Ida and Abram Dardik, who was from Ukraine and had changed the family name. Herrmann attended DeWitt Clinton High School, an all-boys public school at that time on 10th Avenue and 59th Street in New York City. His father encouraged music activity, taking him to the opera, and encouraging him to learn the violin. After winning a composition prize at the age of thirteen, he decided to concentrate on music, and went to New York University, where he studied with Percy Grainger and Philip James. He also studied at the Juilliard School, and at the age of 20, formed his own orchestra, the New Chamber Orchestra of New York.In 1934, he joined the Columbia Broadcasting System as a staff conductor. Within two years, he was appointed music director of the Columbia Workshop, an experimental radio drama series for which Herrmann composed or arranged music. Within nine years, he had become chief conductor to the CBS Symphony Orchestra. He was responsible for introducing more new works to US audiences than any other conductor – he was a particular champion of Charles Ives' music, which was virtually unknown at that time. Herrmann's radio programs of concert music, which were broadcast under such titles as Invitation to Music and Exploring Music, were planned in an unconventional way and featured rarely heard music, old and new, which was not heard in public concert halls. Examples include broadcasts devoted to music of famous amateurs or of notable royal personages, such as the music of Frederick the Great of Prussia, Henry VIII, Charles I of England, Louis XIII and so on.
Herrmann's many US broadcast premieres during the 1940s included Myaskovsky's 22nd Symphony, Gian Francesco Malipiero's 3rd Symphony, Richard Arnell's 1st Symphony, Edmund Rubbra's 3rd Symphony and Ives' 3rd Symphony. He performed the works of Hermann Goetz, Alexander Gretchaninov, Niels Gade and Franz Liszt, and received many outstanding American musical awards and grants for his unusual programming and championship of little-known composers. In Dictators of the Baton, David Ewen wrote that Herrmann was "one of the most invigorating influences in the radio music of the past decade." Also during the 1940s, Herrmann's own concert music was taken up and played by such celebrated maestri as Leopold Stokowski, Sir John Barbirolli, Sir Thomas Beecham and Eugene Ormandy.
In 1934 Herrmann met a young CBS secretary and aspiring writer, Lucille Fletcher. She was impressed with Herrmann's work, and the two began a five-year courtship. Marriage was delayed by the objections of Fletcher's parents, who disliked the fact that Herrmann was a Jew and were put off by what they viewed as his abrasive personality. The couple finally married on October 2, 1939. They had two daughters: Dorothy and Wendy.
Fletcher was to become a noted radio scriptwriter, and she and Herrmann collaborated on several projects throughout their career. He contributed the score to the famed 1941 radio presentation of Fletcher's original story The Hitch-Hiker on The Orson Welles Show, and Fletcher helped to write the libretto for his operatic adaptation of Wuthering Heights. The couple divorced in 1948. The next year, he married Lucille's cousin Lucy Anderson. That marriage lasted until 1964.
Collaboration with Orson Welles
While at CBS, Herrmann met Orson Welles, and wrote or arranged scores for radio shows in which Welles appeared or wrote, such as the Columbia Workshop, Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air and Campbell Playhouse series, which were radio adaptations of literature and film. He conducted the live performances, including Welles's famous adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds broadcast on October 30, 1938, which consisted entirely of pre-existing music. Herrmann used large sections of his score for the inaugural broadcast of The Campbell Playhouse, an adaptation of Rebecca, for the feature film Jane Eyre, the third film in which Welles starred.When Welles gained his RKO Pictures contract, Herrmann worked for him. He wrote his first film score for Citizen Kane and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Score of a Dramatic Picture. The aria from the fictional opera Salammbo, which Kane's wife Susan Alexander performs, was also composed by Herrmann. Welles wanted Herrmann to do a pastiche of real operas, writing in a telegram "Here is a chance for you to do something witty and amusing." Herrmann composed the score for Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons ; like the film, the music was heavily edited by RKO Pictures. When more than half of his score was removed from the soundtrack, Herrmann bitterly severed his ties with the film and promised legal action if his name were not removed from the credits.
Herrmann was music director for Welles's CBS radio series The Orson Welles Show, which included the debut of his wife Lucille Fletcher's suspense classic The Hitch-Hiker; Ceiling Unlimited, a program conceived to glorify the aviation industry and dramatize its role in World War II; and The Mercury Summer Theatre on the Air. "Benny Herrmann was an intimate member of the family", Welles told filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. Between the films by Welles, he wrote the score for William Dieterle's The Devil and Daniel Webster, for which he won his only Academy Award.
Herrmann was among those who rebutted the charges Pauline Kael made in her 1971 essay "Raising Kane", in which she revived controversy over the authorship of the screenplay for Citizen Kane and denigrated Welles's contributions.
Collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock
Herrmann is closely associated with the director Alfred Hitchcock. He wrote the scores for seven Hitchcock films, from The Trouble with Harry to Marnie, a period that included Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. He was also credited as sound consultant on The Birds, as there was no actual music in the film as such, only electronically made bird sounds.The film score for the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much was composed by Herrmann, but two of the more significant pieces of music in the film – the song "Que Sera, Sera " and the Storm Clouds Cantata played in the Royal Albert Hall – are not by Herrmann. However, this film did give Herrmann the opportunity for an on-screen appearance: he is the conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra in the Albert Hall scene. Herrmann's score for Hitchcock's The Wrong Man is in a jazz style and makes heavy use of bass; Emmanuel Balestrero, the wrong man of the title, is a jazz bassist.
Herrmann's most recognizable music is from Hitchcock's Psycho. Unusual for a thriller at the time, the score uses only the string section of the orchestra. The screeching violin heard during the famous shower scene is one of the most famous moments in film score history. Hitchcock admitted at the time that Psycho heavily depended on the music for its tension and sense of pervading doom. David Thomson notes Herrmann's "sly borrowings from Beethoven's Eroica", a recording of which can be seen in the bedroom of Norman Bates. Herrmann's score also had a direct influence on producer George Martin's staccato string arrangement for the Beatles' 1966 single "Eleanor Rigby".
His score for Vertigo is seen as just as masterly. In many of the key scenes, Hitchcock let Herrmann's score take centre stage, a score whose melodies, echoing the "Liebestod" from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, dramatically convey the main character's obsessive love for the image of a woman and underscores that Vertigo, like Tristan, is a story of love and death. Ross writes that Herrmann's homage "is a matter of deliberation and subtlety. The main melodic contour is his own; the harmony is still his idiosyncratic construction. He is jogging the memory of those who know Tristan and the subconscious of those who don't. His veiled citations indicate in their own way the unstoppable recurrence of the past."
A notable feature of the Vertigo score is the ominous two-note falling motif that opens the suite – it is a direct musical imitation of the two notes sounded by the fog horns located at either side of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. This motif has direct relevance to the film because the horns can be clearly heard sounding in just this manner at Fort Point, the spot where a key incident occurs involving the character played by Kim Novak.
However, according to Dan Auiler, author of Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, Herrmann deeply regretted being unable to conduct his composition for Vertigo. A musicians' strike in America meant that it was actually conducted in England and in Austria by Muir Mathieson. Herrmann always personally conducted his own works and given that he considered the composition among his best works, he regarded it as a missed opportunity.
Before Herrmann made the score for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, the movie was called bland by critics and reviewers. Herrmann's orchestral style, consisting of repeating noises helped make Psycho what it was, through the use of thumping bass notes, meant to imitate a victim's heartbeat for example. Herrmann wrote the music for an all-string 50-person orchestra for the movie.
In a question-and-answer session at George Eastman House in October 1973, Herrmann stated that, unlike most film composers who did not have any creative input into the style and tone of the score, he insisted on creative control as a condition of accepting a scoring assignment:
Herrmann stated that Hitchcock would invite him on to the production of a film and, depending on his decision about the length of the music, either expand or contract the scene. It was Hitchcock who asked Herrmann for the "recognition scene" near the end of Vertigo to be played with music.
In 1963, Herrmann began writing original music for the CBS-TV anthology series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, which was in its eighth season. Hitchcock served only as advisor on the show, which he hosted, but Herrmann was again working with former Mercury Theatre actor Norman Lloyd, co-producer of the series. Herrmann scored 17 episodes, and like much of his work for CBS, the music frequently was reused for other programs.
Herrmann's relationship with Hitchcock came to an abrupt end when they disagreed over the score for Torn Curtain. Reportedly pressured by Universal executives, Hitchcock wanted a score that was more jazz- and pop-influenced. Hitchcock's biographer Patrick McGilligan stated that Hitchcock was worried about becoming old-fashioned and felt that Herrmann's music had to change with the times as well. Herrmann initially accepted the offer, but then decided to score the film according to his own ideas. François Truffaut writes that "in 1966, In Hollywood and elsewhere, it was the practice of the film industry to favor scores that would sell as popular records—the kind of film music that could be danced to in discotheques. In this sort of game, Herrmann, a disciple of Wagner and Stravinsky, was bound to be a loser." Truffaut writes that "Herrmann's removal is a flagrant injustice, since it is a matter of record that his contributions to The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Psycho had greatly enhanced the success of these films."
Hitchcock listened to only the prelude of the score, then confronted Herrmann about the pop score. Herrmann, equally incensed, bellowed "Look, Hitch, you can't outjump your own shadow. And you don't make pop pictures. What do you want with me? I don't write pop music." Hitchcock unrelentingly insisted that Herrmann change the score, violating Herrmann's general claim to the creative control he had always maintained in their previous works together. Herrmann then said "Hitch, what's the use of my doing more with you? I had a career before you, and I will afterwards." The score was rejected and replaced with one by John Addison.
According to McGilligan, Herrmann later tried to reconcile with Hitchcock, but Hitchcock refused to see him. Herrmann's widow Norma Herrmann disputed this in a conversation with Günther Kögebehn for the Bernard Herrmann Society in 2004:
In 2009, Norma Herrmann began to auction her husband's personal collection on Bonhams.com, adding more interesting details to the two men's relationship. While Herrmann had brought Hitchcock a copy of his classical work after the break-up, Hitchcock had given Herrmann a copy of his 1967 interview book with François Truffaut, which he inscribed "To Benny with my fondest wishes, Hitch."
"This is rather interesting because it comes a year after Hitchcock had abruptly fired Herrmann from his work scoring Torn Curtain and indicates Hitchcock may have hoped to mend fences with Herrmann and have him score his next film, Topaz," reported Wellesnet, the Orson Welles website, in April 2009:
Herrmann's unused score for Torn Curtain was commercially recorded after his death, initially by Elmer Bernstein for his Film Music Collection subscription record label, then in a fuller realization of the original score by Joel McNeely and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and later, in a concert suite adapted by Christopher Palmer, by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Sony. Some of Herrmann's cues for Torn Curtain were post-synched to the final cut, where they showed how remarkably attuned the composer was to the action, and how, arguably, more effective his score could have been.