Let's ponder for a moment what Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) might have in common beyond having been voted the two finest films in cinema history*.The particular feature they share that I have in mind is also shared with, to name just a few films, Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), the Ray Harryhausen “Dynamation” hit, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad(1958), the Gregory Peck/Robert Mitchum thriller Cape Fear (1962), Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Canny classic movie buffs have determined by now that Bernard Herrmann, composer of the score for each of these films, is the common denominator.
Welles and Herrmann
Herrmann first collaborated with Orson Welles during the 1930s, when the two were working in radio. Welles was involved with programs like the Columbia Workshop, his Mercury Theatre and the Campbell Playhouse, and Herrmann was a music director/conductor/arranger for the CBS radio network. When Welles undertook Citizen Kane, he tagged Herrmann to create its score; Kanewould be the first feature film for both men. Herrmann also provided the score for Welles’s second feature, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and for Jane Eyre (1943), in which Welles starred.Herrmann and Hitchcock
But it is with Alfred Hitchcock that Bernard Herrmann’s career as a film composer is most intimately linked. Beginning with The Trouble with Harry in 1955, the two collaborated on seven films, two of them Hitchcock’s – and Herrmann’s – great masterpieces: Vertigo in 1958 and Psycho in 1960. And two very different scores they are; Vertigo, with its nod to Tristan and Isolde, is lushly orchestral, even operatic, while Psycho is spare, modern, jarring. Both scores have had long-lasting impact. In fact, in 2011 the filmmakers of The Artist, winner of five Oscars including Best Picture, inserted Herrmann’s love theme from Vertigo into their own film's score.Steven Smith, Herrmann’s biographer, reflecting on Herrmann’s special gift as a film composer, noted that “…the thing that Herrmann did again and again, especially in Hitchcock's films, was that he forced the viewer to feel what the characters on screen were feeling. He considered film music, in his phrase, the `communicating link' between the filmmaker and the viewer."
From 1941 until 1975, Bernard Herrmann created the music for 50+ original film and TV works and now his life and career is soon to be recalled with a new feature-length documentary, Lives of Bernard Herrmann. The film, currently in production under the supervision of New York City-based director Brandon Brown, will feature interviews with Herrmann’s oldest daughter, with actor and former TCM host Alec Baldwin and other notables, and will explore at length the legendary composer’s life and work. Lives of Bernard Herrmann is slated for release in Summer 2016.
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The San Francisco Symphony recently announced its 2015 – 2016 season and its “wildly popular” film series is again part of the schedule.This series consists of popular classics presented on the big screen while the orchestra performs the score live. I can attest, having attended a few of these events, that these movie-with-live-orchestra performances are an out-of-this-world experience. And this season, good news for Hitchcock/Herrmann fans, Vertigo, which was first presented during the 2013 - 2014 season, will once more be showcased at Davies Hall.
The complete San Francisco Symphony 2015 - 2016 film series:
- Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), score by Danny Elfman, on Fri. and Sat., Nov. 27 and 28
- Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), score by Dimitri Tiomkin, on Fri. and Sat., Dec. 11 and 12
- Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), score by Bernard Herrmann, on Fri. and Sat., Feb. 12 and 13
- Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), score by John Williams, Fri. and Sat., Mar. 25 and 26
Vertigo (1958)
For more information on Brandon Brown’s Lives of Bernard Herrmann, click here
Click here and scroll down to learn more about the San Francisco Symphony’s 2015 – 2016 film series
Steven Smith is quoted from an October 2000 interview on NPR, Bernard Herrmann’s Score to Psycho
*Sight & Soundcritics poll
Bernard Herrmann