Bernard Herrmann

Many years ago I was driving home from work when I heard on the radio an excerpt from the score of the 1947 film, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Very soon I found myself in tears, as the music provoked in me a strong emotional response that I hadn't expected. Now granted, my blood sugar was probably a bit low so late in the afternoon. Yet I was curious to find out who would have composed such haunting music. I soon learned that the score was written by Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975), one of the seminal composers for the cinema who would have a huge impact on the development of his art for just over a generation and beyond. Composing scores for a series of films, from Citizen Kane (1941) to Taxi Driver (1975), he would perhaps become best known for his decade-long collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock in the middle of his career, as well as for his music for the science fiction classics, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959).


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Bernard Herrmann

Herrmann got his start in radio, on the coattails of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air. Both collaborated on the infamous radio play of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds which aired on Halloween Eve, 1938, and whose realism caused panic among many listeners. When the brilliant Welles went to Hollywood to make Citizen Kane, perennially judged by critics the best film ever, Herrmann accompanied him and wrote a memorable score which not only broke new ground but set a high standard for his peers and successors. Up to that point composers were simply composing orchestral music to accompany the activities of the people on the screen. By contrast, Herrmann wrote music that captured the very emotions ascribed to the performers and elicited them in the viewer as well. The best example of this by far is the murder scene in Hitchcock's Psycho, in which the now-famous screeching violins communicate the stark terror of this unanticipated development in the plot.

Indeed Herrmann's best work was done for Hitchcock, beginning with The Trouble with Harry (1955) and ending with the mediocre Torn Curtain (1966), where the two artistic geniuses parted ways acrimoniously. In between there were, among others, Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960), whose scores are so prominent as to justify their being listed as co-stars, along with the principal actors. My own view is that Psycho would today be judged far less of a film without Herrmann's agitated musical phrases building the tension throughout. The collaboration ended when Hitchcock fired Herrmann on the set of Torn Curtain over an artistic disagreement. This was a serious mistake on Hitch's part. Herrmann's score was already mostly completed, but Hitch hired John Addison to write a new one. Addison's music is too melodic and appears to have been written independently of the screen action. It fails to build suspense or to compensate for the weak plot and the wooden acting of Paul Newman and Julie Andrews.

I've never seen Taxi Driver, but I have seen Herrmann's last-but-one film, Brian De Palma's Obsession, a near remake of Vertigo. It is not a particularly good film. The actors are not convincing in their parts, and the plot is riddled with flaws. Yet the music manages to carry the film, almost single-handedly. Herrmann died only hours after recording the last of his Taxi Driver score at the end of 1975.

Herrmann has been much imitated. But in my view the only composer who has even approached Herrmann in his ability to evoke a variety of strong emotions in his listeners is British composer Julian Nott, best known for his scores for Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit episodes.