Bernard Herrmann with Orson Welles
Bernard Herrmann, American film composer, was born 111 years ago today.
Winner of an Academy Award for The Devil and Daniel Webster in 1941, Herrmann is particularly known for his collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock, most famously Psycho, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo.
He also composed scores for many other movies, including Citizen Kane, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Cape Fear and Taxi Driver.
He worked extensively in radio drama with Orson Welles, composed the scores for several fantasy films by Ray Harryhausen and worked on many TV programs, including Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone and Have Gun—Will Travel.
Born in New York City as Max Herman, Herrmann was the son of a Jewish middle-class family of Russian origin. He attended DeWitt Clinton High 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. He went to New York University where he studied with Percy Grainger and Philip James. He also studied at the Juilliard School.
At the age of 20, Herrmann formed his own orchestra — the New Chamber Orchestra of New York. In 1934, he joined the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) 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 (one notable program was The Fall of the City).
In nine years, he had become chief conductor to the CBS Symphony Orchestra. He was responsible for introducing more new works to U.S. audiences than any other conductor.
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.
Between two movies made by Orson Welles, he wrote the score for William Dieterle's The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), for which he won his only Oscar. In 1947, Herrmann scored the atmospheric music for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
In 1934, Herrmann met a young CBS secretary and aspiring writer, Lucille Fletcher. Fletcher 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. Fletcher was to become a noted radio screenwriter, and she and Herrmann collaborated on several projects throughout their career.
Herrmann contributed the score to the notable 1941 radio presentation of Fletcher's original story, The Hitch-Hiker, on the Orson Welles radio show. Fletcher also helped to write the libretto for Herrmann’s operatic adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
The couple divorced in 1948. The next year he married Lucille's cousin, Lucy (Kathy Lucille) Anderson. That marriage lasted 16 years — until 1964.
While at CBS, Herrmann met Orson Welles. He wrote or arranged scores for Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air and Campbell Playhouse series (1938–1940), 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. He also did the music for the feature film, Jane Eyre (1943), the third film in which Welles starred.
Herrmann did music for Ceiling Unlimited (1942) — a program conceived to glorify the aviation industry and dramatize its role in World War II — and The Mercury Summer Theatre on the Air (1946). "Benny Herrmann was an intimate member of the family," Welles said in an interview.
When Welles moved to movies, Herrmann went with him. He wrote his first film score for Citizen Kane (1941) and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Score of a Dramatic Picture. He composed the score for Welles's second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Like the film itself, Herrmann’s music was heavily edited by the studio, 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 is most closely associated with the director, Alfred Hitchcock. He wrote the scores for almost every Hitchcock film from The Trouble with Harry (1955) to Marnie (1964), a period which included Vertigo, Psycho and North by Northwest. He oversaw the sound design in The Birds (1963), although there was no actual music in the film as such — only electronically generated bird sounds.
Herrmann's most recognizable music is from another Hitchcock film, Psycho. Unusual for a thriller at the time, the score uses only the string section of the orchestra. The screeching violin music heard during the famous shower scene (which Hitchcock originally suggested have no music at all) is one of the most famous moments in film score history.
His score for Vertigo (1958) is seen as just as masterful. In many of the key scenes, Hitchcock let Herrmann's score take center 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 woman he tries to shape into a long-dead, past love.
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 (as heard from the San Francisco side of the bridge).
This motif has direct relevance to the film, since the horns can be clearly heard sounding in just this manner at Fort Point, the spot where the character played by Kim Novak jumps into the bay.
In a question-and-answer session at the George Eastman Museum 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:
“I have the final say, or I don’t do the music. The reason for insisting on this is simply, compared to Orson Welles, a man of great musical culture, most other directors are just babes in the woods. If you were to follow their taste, the music would be awful. There are exceptions.
“I once did a film, The Devil and Daniel Webster, with a wonderful director, William Dieterle. He was also a man of great musical culture. And Hitchcock, you know, is very sensitive; he leaves me alone. It depends on the person. But if I have to take what a director says, I’d rather not do the film. I find it’s impossible to work that way.”
Herrmann is still a prominent figure in the world of film music today, despite his death at age 64 in 1975. As such, his career has been studied extensively by biographers and documentarians. His string-only score for Psycho, for example, set the standard when it became a new way to write music for thrillers (rather than using big fully-orchestrated pieces).
In 1992 a documentary, Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann, was made about him. Also in 1992, a National Public Radio documentary was produced on his life — Bernard Herrmann: A Celebration of his Life and Music by Bruce A. Crawford.
In 1991, Steven C. Smith wrote a Herrmann biography titled A Heart at Fire's Center, a quotation from a favorite Stephen Spender poem of Herrmann's.
Here, Andre Previn conducts a suite from Psycho, with The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1979