Bernard Herrmann

All Music Guide:

Bernard Herrmann was arguably the most innovative film composer of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, even though he actually rejected the term "film composer," preferring to call himself a composer who sometimes wrote film scores. That was an apt description for a musician who, in addition to his film work, also composed works in a variety of other forms including opera, symphony, musical comedy, and concert music, as well as writing extensively for radio and television, while maintaining a concurrent conducting career that found him wielding a baton before major orchestras in New York, London, Los Angeles, and other cities, and in recording studios where he committed many of his compositions and those of other composers to disc. Nevertheless, his greatest fame came as an Academy Award-winning movie scorer who provided background music for 47 feature films released between 1941 and 1976, among them such cinema classics as Citizen Kane, Psycho, and Taxi Driver. That isn't actually such a large number of credits for the typical A-list Hollywood composer, who might have been expected to score twice as many motion pictures in three and a half decades. But Herrmann was deliberately selective in accepting screen assignments, determined to take the time to orchestrate his own scores, a practically unheard-of practice that contributed to the unusual nature of his writing. Unlike his peers and their arrangers, who tended to make full use of the existing orchestras at the movie studios, resulting in scores that sounded like traditional classical music, he made unusual decisions about what instruments to use, often employing far fewer musicians to more striking effect. Nor was he much interested in writing conventional melodic themes, preferring instead ostinatos and dramatic sound-effects-like passages that emphasized the suspenseful developments in his films for director Alfred Hitchcock, for example, or brought out the grandeur of the fantasy elements in his films for producer Charles Schneer and special effects expert Ray Harryhausen.

Herrmann was born June 29, 1911, in New York City, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants Abraham Herrmann (who had changed his name from Abraham Dardick), an optometrist, and Ida (Gorenstein) Herrmann. He showed an early interest in music and began studying the violin as a child, quickly moving on to trying to write music. Around 1927, while attending DeWitt Clinton High School, he began studying composition with Gustav Heine. His first notable work was a tone poem called The Forest that he wrote in January 1929. While still in high school, he managed to enroll at the fine arts school at New York University (NYU), where he studied composition with Philip James and conducting with Albert Stoessel. When Stoessel became head of the opera and orchestra department at the Juilliard School of Music in the fall of 1930, Herrmann was able to become a fellowship student there, also studying composition and harmony with Bernard Wagenaar. He graduated from high school in January 1931 and continued at Juilliard until May 1932, when he left without taking a degree. That fall, he returned briefly to NYU, where he attended lectures in advanced composition and orchestration given by Percy Grainger; he also worked as a music editor and arranger at the Harms music publishing company during this time. That fall, he was asked by dancers he had met at Juilliard to arrange ballet music for their appearance in the musical revue New Americana, which inadvertently led to his professional composing, conducting, and Broadway debuts when he went on to direct the orchestra during his arrangement of "The Shakers" and his own original piece, "Amour à la Militaire," at the show's opening on October 5, 1932; it ran 77 performances, through December 10.

With the Depression at its height, Herrmann and Hans Spialek, an orchestrator at Harms, were able to put together their own orchestra of unemployed musicians, the New Chamber Orchestra, which gave its first concert at the New School for Social Research on May 17, 1933. At this and subsequent concerts, Herrmann conducted his own compositions and those of many modern composers he favored; he was a particular champion of the then-unknown Charles Ives. In 1934, Herrmann was hired as an arranger and rehearsal conductor for the CBS radio network. He rose to the position of composer/conductor for the network, where he worked full-time for the next 17 years, contributing to numerous national radio shows. Four years into his tenure, he began working on the program The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a radio version of an acclaimed New York theater company led by Orson Welles and John Houseman. On October 30, 1938, Herrmann provided the musical cues for the show's notorious adaptation of H.G. Wells' science fiction novel The War of the Worlds, which convinced many listeners that Martians really were invading the earth. The following year, Welles signed a contract with the RKO movie studio to develop motion pictures, and he asked Herrmann to join him. Herrmann took a leave of absence from CBS and boarded a cross-country train for Hollywood. Just before he left New York, he married writer Lucille Fletcher on October 2, 1939. Meanwhile, his reputation as a composer continued to grow; his cantata Moby Dick was given its concert premiere by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra on April 11, 1940.

Welles worked on several ideas for his first film before settling on Citizen Kane, the fictional screen biography of wealthy newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, based loosely on real-life figure William Randolph Hearst. In a production that broke many precedents of moviemaking, not the least of the departures from the norm was Welles' welcoming of his composer into the project during shooting, not, as is standard, only as part of the post-production process. Welles even shaped scenes to Herrmann's music instead of the other way around. He also gave Herrmann the opportunity to write a variety of kinds of music, even including a nearly impossible-to-sing opera aria meant to emphasize the vocal inadequacies of Kane's mistress. The composer returned to New York and CBS after the score was recorded in the fall of 1940, turning his attention to the symphony that the network and the New York Philharmonic had jointly commissioned him to write. It was actually premiered on CBS on July 27, 1941, under his direction, on the same day that his daughter Dorothy Herrmann was born. (The New York Philharmonic gave it its concert debut in the fall of 1942.) A second daughter, Wendy Herrmann, was born October 18, 1945. Citizen Kane, meanwhile, had opened on May 1, 1941. Although it was not a great financial success in its initial run, the film went on to legendary status, routinely cited as the greatest movie ever made. The concept of the "original motion picture soundtrack" album was still years away, but a soundtrack LP did appear on the Mark '56 label in 1980, and in 1991 the Australian Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Tony Bremner, released a recording of the score on Preamble Records.

Herrmann returned to Hollywood and to RKO in the summer of 1941 to score his next film, All That Money Can Buy (aka The Devil and Daniel Webster). It appeared in October, and, like Citizen Kane, earned him a nomination for the 1941 Academy Award for best dramatic score. In fact, it bested Citizen Kane in the voting; on February 26, 1942, Herrmann took home the Oscar on only his second try. At that time, he was working on his third score, which was his second for Welles, The Magnificent Ambersons. Unfortunately, it did not turn out as well as Citizen Kane. While Welles and Herrmann were pleased with the film, RKO was not, and the studio recut the film, changed the ending, and brought in another composer to write music to cover the alterations. By the time it was released in August 1942, Herrmann had insisted that his name be removed from the credits. (In 1990, the Australian Philharmonic Orchestra released its recording of the complete and restored score as originally written.)

Both because of this unpleasant experience and because he still had a full-time job in New York, Herrmann returned to CBS in the spring of 1942 and devoted himself to composing and conducting for radio shows such as Suspense and, starting in the spring of 1943, Invitation to Music. He was lured back to Hollywood to score an adaptation of Jane Eyre at 20th Century Fox starring Joan Fontaine in the title role and Welles as Edward Rochester; it opened in February 1944. (Half a century later, two versions of the score appeared on disc: in 1993, the original soundtrack was paired with David Raksin's score for Laura by Fox Records -- Herrmann had turned down Laura -- and in 1995 a newly recorded version by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra of Bratislava, conducted by Adriano, appeared on Marco Polo Records.) It did not, however, signal that the composer was ready to return to Hollywood full-time. On the contrary, he had begun work on another project related to a classic of British literature, adapting Wuthering Heights as an opera. In November 1943, he was appointed chief conductor of the CBS Symphony. And on December 16, he conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere of his orchestral work For the Fallen, a timely piece on the theme of war that had been commissioned by the League of Composers.

Over the next several years, Herrmann spent most of his time at CBS or at work on his opera, while taking only occasional film assignments: Hangover Square (January 1945); Anna and the King of Siam (June 1946; his third Academy Award nomination); The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (May 1947); and the love theme for Portrait of Jennie (December 1948). (In 1975, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Elmer Bernstein, issued a recording of the score for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir on Bernstein's Film Music Collection label; Varèse Sarabande Records released the actual soundtrack recording in 1997.) One of Herrmann's notable efforts for radio during this period was a special broadcast on V-E (Victory in Europe) Day, May 8, 1945, on all three networks, On a Note of Triumph. The show was pressed on disc and released by Columbia Records. In July 1948, Herrmann divorced his wife. He married her cousin, Kathy Lucille Anderson, in August 1949. This marriage lasted 15 years before it, too, ended in divorce, in 1964. Herrmann married British journalist Norma Shepherd on November 27, 1967.

A turning point in Herrmann's professional life occurred in 1951. That year, he finally completed Wuthering Heights after eight years of work. He would never see a production of it during his lifetime, although in 1966 he made a deal with the British label Pye Records to record it, largely at his own expense. It was finally given its world premiere by the Portland Opera Company in November 1982. Also in 1951, CBS, bowing to the decline in radio listening with the rise of television, disbanded the CBS Symphony, putting him out of work. As a result, he moved to California and, after more than ten years of dabbling in film composing, finally turned to it as his main occupation. For the next ten years, he maintained the two-or-three-films-a-year schedule typical of a major Hollywood composer. Even before he left New York, he had written the score for director Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, although its December 1951 premiere was preceded by his next project, the science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still, released in September, the latter making innovative use of the theremin. (In 1993, Fox Records belatedly released an original soundtrack album for The Day the Earth Stood Still. On Dangerous Ground got a soundtrack release a decade after that on the Film Score Monthly label.) Not long after, in February 1952, came Five Fingers, a spy thriller, although Herrmann's major project for the year was the screen adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," which appeared in September and became one of the top-grossing films of 1952. Working steadily, Herrmann had three films in release in 1953, starting with White Witch Doctor that summer, followed by two December openings, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef and King of the Khyber Rifles. (In 2001, the Film Score Monthly label finally released a soundtrack album for Beneath the 12-Mile Reef.) His next two films both appeared in the summer of 1954, with the Western Garden of Evil followed by The Egyptian, the latter a lavish historical drama on which 20th Century Fox music department head Alfred Newman brought him in to share composing duties because of the picture's length and deadline. The Egyptian marked the first instance in which a Herrmann film score was released on a contemporaneous soundtrack album; the LP was released by Decca Records. Herrmann next turned his attention to television, composing the score for an adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol that was broadcast on CBS Christmas Eve.

Three more Herrmann screen efforts appeared in 1955, starting in January with Prince of Players. (In 1998, the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, conducted by William T. Stromberg, released an album combining music from Garden of Evil with a suite from Prince of Players on Marco Polo Records.) Next, in the summer, came another Western, The Kentuckian. (In 1977, the National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Fred Steiner, released a recording of the score of The Kentuckian on Entr'acte Records.) But the most important film of the year for Herrmann appeared in October; it was The Trouble with Harry, the first of seven films the composer scored for veteran director Alfred Hitchcock. (In 1998, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Joel McNeely, released a recording of the score of The Trouble with Harry on Varèse Sarabande.) On December 23, 1955, CBS television broadcast Herrmann's second consecutive Christmas project, A Child Is Born, based on a story by Stephen Vincent Benet, and a soundtrack album was released by MCA Records.

Herrmann had two new films in the spring of 1956, with similar titles. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, issued in April, was followed in May by The Man Who Knew Too Much. The latter was another Hitchcock collaboration, in which Herrmann actually appeared onscreen as himself, conducting the London Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall in London in the suspenseful climax. Also during the year, he engaged in other musical activities, serving as guest conductor for the Houston Symphony and, in a final radio effort, scoring and conducting an adaptation of Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World for the Columbia Workshop series. A third Hitchcock film, The Wrong Man, appeared in early 1957. Herrmann's second film score for that year came with the drama A Hatful of Rain in the summer. He had three movies in release in 1958. The celebrated Vertigo, which appeared in May, was his fourth film for Hitchcock. It was accompanied by a soundtrack album released on Mercury Records. (The score was re-recorded by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Joel McNeely, for a 1995 album released by Varèse Sarabande.) The Naked and the Dead, which opened during the summer, was an adaptation of Norman Mailer's World War II novel. And The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, which appeared late in the year, marked the start of Herrmann's work on the fantasy films of Ray Harryhausen. The composer conducted the music on the soundtrack album released by Colpix Records. Another three Herrmann scores followed in 1959. In the summer, there was the drama Blue Denim, and in the same season came the next Hitchcock project, North by Northwest. (In 1980, the London Studio Orchestra, conducted by Laurie Johnson, issued a recording of the score of North by Northwest on Starlog Records; Rhino Records finally put out a soundtrack album conducted by the composer in 1996.) Another Harryhausen film, Journey to the Center of the Earth, followed in December. (Varèse Sarabande belatedly released a Herrmann-conducted soundtrack album in 1997.) Herrmann had had plenty of music on television series during the 1950s, both because CBS reused his radio music and because he wrote new themes and scores for such shows as Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel. On October 2, 1959, CBS began broadcasting the macabre anthology series The Twilight Zone, for which he wrote a number of episode scores later released on disc on several albums by Varèse Sarabande in the 1980s.

There were two Herrmann scores for films of 1960, both from his ongoing collaborations. In June came Psycho, the peak of the composer's work with Hitchcock and, with its strings-only instrumentation, among his most memorable works. (In 1975, Herrmann conducted a recording of his score with the National Philharmonic Orchestra for release on Unicorn Records; the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Joel McNeely, made a recording for Varèse Sarabande in 1996.) The Three Worlds of Gulliver, another Harryhausen special effects fantasy, followed in December, with a soundtrack LP issued by Colpix in 1961. (The Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Jay McNeely, issued a newly made recording on Varèse Sarabande in 2001.) A full year passed before another Herrmann score was in movie theaters, and it was the next of the Harryhausen pictures, Mysterious Island. Herrmann's assignments began to diminish in the early '60s as movie producers became more interested in pop-oriented scores featuring potential hit songs to promote their films, a trend that he was not inclined or really able to follow. He did, however, continue to find work. Tender Is the Night, released in January 1962, was an adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. (20th Century Fox Records released the soundtrack, conducted by the composer.) Cape Fear, which followed in the spring, was a Hitchcock-style thriller, directed by J. Lee Thompson. (For director Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake of the film, Elmer Bernstein adapted Herrmann's score, and this version was released on a soundtrack album by MCA.) After doing some scoring for another TV Western series, The Virginian, Herrmann went back to work with Hitchcock himself on the director's next film, The Birds. But when it appeared in the spring of 1963, his credit was "sound construction," since the horror film did not have a musical score per se. The same season, he was represented in theaters by his last collaboration with Harryhausen, Jason and the Argonauts. (In 1999, the Sinfonia of London, conducted by Bruce Broughton, released a recording of the score on Intrada Records.) Also in 1963, Herrmann became more involved with scoring episodes of the TV series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. His next film was his last successful collaboration with Hitchcock, Marnie, released in June 1964, his only screen score of that year.

With the breakup of his second marriage and a drop-off in film assignments, Herrmann, a lifelong Anglophile, began to spend half of each year at an apartment he had taken in London. His only movie of 1965 was Joy in the Morning. (Forty years later, the Film Score Monthly label issued a CD containing the original soundtrack.) He wrote a score for the next Hitchcock film, Torn Curtain, but the director, under pressure from producers to have a pop soundtrack, rejected it. (The unused score, generally regarded as far superior to the John Addison score actually used in the film, was recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for Elmer Bernstein's Film Music Collection label in 1977 and by the National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Jay McNeely, for Varèse Sarabande in 1998. In the Oscar-nominated 1992 documentary Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann, the filmmakers even went a step further, matching some of the music to a scene from the film.) The split with Hitchcock was one more indication that Herrmann was out of fashion in Hollywood, but he continued to be held in high regard internationally, and for the next five years all of his scoring assignments came out of Europe, starting with Fahrenheit 451, a version of the Ray Bradbury novel directed by François Truffaut and released in the fall of 1966. Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black, which opened in the U.S. in the spring of 1968, also used a Herrmann score. Meanwhile, the composer was occupying himself in London making recordings of his repertoire for various record labels. There was his opera, Wuthering Heights, for Pye, and for the same company he also cut a version of his Moby Dick cantata and an LP containing suites from his first two films, the Citizen Kane music dubbed "Welles Raises Kane," and the All That Money Can Buy cues by the alternate title "The Devil and Daniel Webster." These recordings were made in 1967 with the London Philharmonic. In 1968, Herrmann contracted with Decca's London Records subsidiary for a series of albums of his movie music to be made for its "Phase 4" stereo series, beginning with The Great Movie Thrillers. Again, the orchestra was the London Philharmonic. Other releases in the series, which continued into the mid-'70s, included Great Tone Poems (Herrmann's interpretation of works by such composers as Liszt and Sibelius), a version of Gustav Holst's The Planets, Great Film Classics, The Impressionists, Great British Film Scores (volumes one and two), Great Shakespearean Films, The Mysterious Film World of Bernard Herrmann, and The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann, with the National Philharmonic Orchestra performing in most cases. Also working with the Unicorn label, he recorded a version of Joachim Raff's Lenore Symphony.

The Bride Wore Black was not Herrmann's only score of 1968. He followed it with the British production Twisted Nerve, for which he also served as music director. (The soundtrack album was released by Polydor Records.) And he wrote his only TV movie score, for Companions in Nightmare. He also worked on his only musical comedy, The King of Schnorrers, which was given a production at the Goodspeed Opera House, a prominent regional theater in Connecticut, in 1970. But he was largely inactive as a film composer in the late '60s and early '70s before accepting an assignment to write a score for the English-language version of the international co-production The Battle of Neretva, released in different territories at different times. (Entr'acte released the soundtrack album, conducted by the composer, in 1975.) Two film assignments in 1971 followed, The Night Digger and Endless Night. The same year, he formalized his living arrangements, giving up his house in California and moving permanently to London. With few film assignments, he devoted himself more to recording classical albums in 1971 and 1972, including The Four Faces of Jazz (those faces, curiously, being Kurt Weill, George Gershwin, Milhaud, and Stravinsky) for Decca with the London Festival Recording Ensemble and Charles Ives' Second Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra. (In 1974, Herrmann recorded his own sole symphony, giving it its first hearing since 1942.)

Herrmann's uncompromising devotion to innovation in film scoring began to bear fruit in the early '70s as a new generation of filmmakers, awed by his work with Hitchcock and others, began to seek him out, starting with director Brian de Palma, who hired him to do his first American score since 1965 for the Hitchcock-influenced thriller Sisters, released in March 1973. (The Herrmann-conducted soundtrack album was released by Entr'acte.) Larry Cohen, another young director, requested Herrmann for his 1974 horror film It's Alive! (Some of this music was reused in the sequels It Lives Again and It's Alive III: Island of the Alive.) De Palma then brought him back for his next film, another Hitchcock-styled thriller called Obsession, shot in 1975. Meanwhile, Herrmann continued to record his own compositions and those of others for Unicorn, including A Musical Garland of the Seasons and, in his last independent recording on October 2, 1975, his version of the Psycho score. Yet another young director, Martin Scorsese, engaged him to score Taxi Driver, and on December 20, 1975, he flew to Los Angeles to record it. The sessions took place on December 22 and 23, and after they were completed, Herrmann returned to his hotel room, where, in the early hours of December 24, 1975, he died in his sleep of congestive heart failure at the age of 64. Taxi Driver opened in February 1976, accompanied by a soundtrack album released on Arista Records that used little of the score. (An expanded 1998 reissue restored it.) Obsession followed in July, its Herrmann-conducted soundtrack album released on London/Phase 4. Both scores earned Academy Award nominations.

During Herrmann's lifetime, his career as a film composer was hampered not only by changing fashions in moviemaking, but also by a personality perceived as abrasive by many of his colleagues. (The headline to his Variety obituary referred to him as "Both Hated and Respected," and in its first sentence his "temperament" was described as "acerbic and iconoclastic.") But that character trait may be indivisible from his perfectionism and relentless devotion to creativity, and those led to an unbroken increase in his critical stature in the decades after his death. As detailed above, many of his film scores were given new recordings and/or belated soundtrack album releases in the 1970s, '80s, '90s, and 2000s, and, in addition to his own reissued recordings of his music, many other collections also appeared. (Notable among these are Citizen Kane: The Classic Film Scores of Bernard Herrmann, by the National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Charles Gerhardt, on RCA, 1974; Bernard Herrmann Film Scores: From Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver, by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Elmer Bernstein, on Milan, 1993; Bernard Herrmann: The Film Scores, by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, on Sony Classical, 1996; and Torn Curtain: The Classic Film Music of Bernard Herrmann, by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Paul Bateman, on Silva Screen, 1996. By the turn of the 21st century, it was not unusual to see him described as the greatest film composer of his era, and his work proved profoundly influential on the scorers who followed him.

Wikipedia:

Bernard Herrmann (June 29, 1911 – December 24, 1975) was an American composer known for his work in motion pictures.

An Academy Award-winner (for The Devil and Daniel Webster, 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 (composing for Orson Welles), composed the scores for several fantasy films by Ray Harryhausen, and many TV programs including Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone and Have Gun–Will Travel.

Early life and career[edit]

Herrmann, the son of a Jewish middle-class family of Russian origin, was born in New York City as Max Herman. He attended high school at 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, 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 twenty, 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). Within nine years, he had become Chief Conductor to the CBS Symphony Orchestra. He was responsible for introducing more new works to US audience 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, 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.

Between two movies made by Orson Welles (see below), 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. 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 (Kathy Lucille) Anderson. That marriage lasted 16 years, until 1964.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Collaboration with Orson Welles[edit]

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 (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, for the feature film Jane Eyre (1943), 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 (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, the 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 also created the music for Welles's CBS radio series the Orson Welles Show (1941–1942), which included the debut of his wife Lucille Fletcher's suspense classic, The Hitch-Hiker; 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 told filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock[edit]

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 made bird sounds.

The music for the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) was only partly by Herrmann. The two most significant pieces of music in the film—the song, "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)", and the Storm Clouds Cantata played in the Royal Albert Hall—are not by Herrmann (although he did re-orchestrate the cantata by Australian-born composer Arthur Benjamin written for the earlier Hitchcock film of the same name). 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 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.

However, according to Dan Aulier (author of Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic), Herrmann deeply regretted being unable to conduct his composition for Vertigo. A musician's strike in America meant that it was actually conducted in England by Muir Mathieson. Herrmann always personally conducted his own works and while he considered the composition among his best works, he regarded it as a missed opportunity.

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 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 (the scene in which James Stewart's character suddenly realizes Kim Novak's identity) 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 himself served only as advisor on the show, which he hosted, but Herrmann was again working with former Mercury Theatre actor Norman Lloyd, co-producer (with Joan Harrison) of the series. Herrmann scored 17 episodes (1963–1965) and, like much of his work for CBS, the music was frequently 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.

Hitchcock listened to only the prelude of the score before confronting 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 been maintained in their previous work 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:

I met Hitchcock very briefly. Everybody says they never spoke again. I met him, it was cool, it was not a warm meeting. It was in Universal Studios, this must be 69, 70, 71ish. And we were in Universal for some other reason and Herrmann said: "See that tiny little office over there, that’s Hitch. And that stupid little parking place. Hitch used to have an empire with big offices and a big staff. Then they made it down to half that size, then they made it to half that size … We are going over to say hello." Actually [Herrmann] got a record; he was always intending to give him a record he just made. But it wasn’t a film thing. It was either Moby Dick or something of his concert pieces to take it and give to Hitch. Peggy, Hitchcock’s secretary was there. Hitch came out, Benny said: "I thought you’d like a copy of this." "How are you?" etc. and he introduced me. And Hitchcock was cool, but they did meet. They met, I was there. And when Herrmann came out again he said: “What a great reduction in Hitch’s status."

In 2009, Norma Herrmann began to auction off 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:

Of course, once Herrmann felt he had been wronged, he was not going to say "yes" to Hitchcock unless he was courted and it seems unlikely that Hitchcock would be willing to do that, although apparently Hitchcock did ask Herrmann back to score his last film Family Plot right before Herrmann died. Herrmann, who had a full schedule of films planned for 1976, including DePalma’s Carrie, The Seven Per Cent Solution and Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To, was reportedly happy to be in a position to ignore Hitchcock’s reunion offer.

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 (reissued by Warner Bros. Records), 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 later 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.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Later life and death[edit]

From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, Herrmann scored a series of notable mythically-themed fantasy films, including Journey to the Center of the Earth and the Ray Harryhausen Dynamation epics Jason and the Argonauts, Mysterious Island, The Three Worlds of Gulliver, and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad .

During the same period, Herrmann turned his talents to writing scores for television shows. Perhaps most notably, he wrote the scores for several well-known episodes of the original Twilight Zone series, including the lesser known theme used during the series' first season, as well as the opening theme to Have Gun–Will Travel.

In the mid-1960s he composed the highly-regarded music score for François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451. Scored for strings, two harps, vibraphone, xylophone and glockenspiel, Herrmann's score created a driving, neurotic mood that perfectly suited the film. It also had a direct influence on producer George Martin's staccato string arrangement for Beatles 1966 smash hit single "Eleanor Rigby".

By 1967 Herrmann worked almost exclusively in England. In November 1967, the 56-year-old composer married 27-year-old journalist Norma Shepherd, his third wife. In August 1971 the Herrmanns made London their permanent home.

Herrmann's last film scores included Sisters and Obsession for Brian De Palma. His final film soundtrack, and the last work he completed before his death, was his sombre score for Taxi Driver (1976), directed by Martin Scorsese. It was De Palma who had suggested to Scorsese to use the composer. Immediately after finishing the recording of the Taxi Driver soundtrack on December 23, 1975, Herrmann viewed the rough cut of what was to be his next film assignment, Larry Cohen's God Told Me To, and dined with Cohen, after which he returned to his hotel for the night. Bernard Herrmann died from cardiovascular disease in his sleep at his hotel in Los Angeles, during the night. Scorsese and Cohen dedicated both Taxi Driver and God Told Me To to Herrmann's memory. Coincidentally, according to a 2011 interview on a TCM television special, Steven Spielberg recalls Herrmann's last day. Taxi Driver director and Spielberg friend Martin Scorsese actually called Steven over to Warner Bros. Studio on December 23, 1975 to meet the famed film composer. There, Spielberg met Herrmann, recalled as a very rotund man chomping on a big cigar, and very gracious to the professional praise from the young filmmaker. Herrmann would die in his sleep, just hours later.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Other works[edit]

As well as his many film scores, Herrmann wrote several concert pieces, including a symphony in 1941; the opera Wuthering Heights; the cantata Moby Dick (1938), dedicated to Charles Ives; and For the Fallen, a tribute to the soldiers who died in battle in World War II, among others. He recorded all these compositions, and several others, for the Unicorn label during his last years in London.

Compositional style and philosophy[edit]

Herrmann's music is typified by frequent use of ostinati (short repeating patterns), novel orchestration and, in his film scores, an ability to portray character traits not altogether obvious from other elements of the film.

Early in his life, Herrmann committed himself to a creed of personal integrity at the price of unpopularity: the quintessential artist. His philosophy is summarized by a favorite Tolstoy quote: ‘Eagles fly alone and sparrows fly in flocks.' Thus, Herrmann would only compose music for films when he was allowed the artistic liberty to compose what he wished without the director getting in the way. As already indicated, this was the cause of the split with Hitchcock after over a decade of composing scores for the director's films.

His philosophy of orchestrating film was based on the assumption that the musicians were selected and hired for the recording session—that this music was not constrained to the musical forces of the concert hall. For example, his use of ten harps in Beneath the 12 Mile Reef created an extraordinary underwater-like sonic landscape; his use of four alto flutes in Citizen Kane contributed to the creepy opening, only matched by the use of 12 flutes in his unused Torn Curtain score; and his use of the serpent in White Witch Doctor is possibly the first use of that instrument in a film score.

Herrmann said in an interview: "To orchestrate is like a thumbprint. I can't understand having someone else do it. It would be like someone putting color to your paintings."

Herrmann subscribed to the belief since held by many that the best film music should be able to stand on its own legs when detached from the film for which it was originally written. To this end, he made several well-known recordings for Decca of arrangements of his own film music as well as music of other prominent composers.

Use of electronic instruments[edit]

Herrmann's involvement with electronic musical instruments dates back to 1951, when he used the theremin in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Robert B. Sexton has noted that this score involved the use of treble and bass theremins (played by Dr. Samuel Hoffmann and Paul Shure), electric strings, bass, prepared piano, and guitar together with various pianos and harps, electronic organs, brass, and percussion, and that Herrmann treated the theremins as a truly orchestral section.

Herrmann was a sound consultant on The Birds, which made extensive use of an electronic instrument called the mixturtrautonium, although the instrument was performed by Oskar Sala on the film’s soundtrack. Herrmann used several electronic instruments on his score of It’s Alive, as well as the Moog synthesizer for the main theme in Endless Night.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Legacy and recording[edit]

Herrmann is still a prominent figure in the world of film music today, despite his death over 35 years ago. 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 big fully orchestrated pieces). In 1992 a documentary, Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann, was made about him. Also in 1992 a 2½ hour long National Public Radio documentary was produced on his life — Bernard Herrmann: A Celebration of his Life and Music (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.

His music continues to be used in films and recordings after his death. "Georgie's Theme" from Herrmann's score for the 1968 film Twisted Nerve is whistled by one-eyed nurse Elle Driver in the hospital corridor scene in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003). The opening theme from Vertigo was used in the prologue to Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" video, and during a flashback sequence in the pilot episode of FX's American Horror Story, which also featured "Georgie's Theme" in later episodes as a recurring musical motif for the character of Tate. Fellow film composer Danny Elfman adapted Herrmann's music for Psycho for use in director Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake and borrowed from Herrmann's "Mountaintop/Sunrise" theme, from Journey to the Center of the Earth, for his main Batman theme. On their 1977 album Ra, American progressive rock group Utopia also adapted "Mountaintop/Sunrise," in a rock arrangement, as the introduction to the album's opening song, "Communion With The Sun." And most recently, Ludovic Bource used the love theme from Vertigo literally in the last reels of 2011's The Artist.

Herrmann's film music is well represented on disc. His friend, John Steven Lasher, has produced several albums featuring Urtext recordings, including Battle of Neretva, Citizen Kane, The Kentuckian, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Night Digger and Sisters, under various labels owned by Fifth Continent Australia Pty Ltd.

Herrmann was an early and enthusiastic proponent of the music of Charles Ives. He met Ives in the early 1940s, performed many of his works while conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra, and conducted the world premiere performance of Ives' Second Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra on his first visit to London in 1956. Herrmann later made a recording of the work in 1970 and this reunion with the LSO, after more than a decade, was significant to him for several reasons - he had long hoped to record his own interpretation of the symphony, feeling that Leonard Bernstein's 1951 version was "overblown and innaccurate"; on a personal level, it also served to assuage Herrmann's long-held feeling that he had been snubbed by the orchestra after his first visit in 1956. The notoriously prickly composer had also been enraged by the recent appointment of the LSO's new chief conductor André Previn, who Herrmann detested, and deprecatingly referred to as "that jazz boy".

Herrmann was also an ardent champion of the romantic-era composer Joachim Raff, whose music had fallen into near-oblivion by the 1960s. During the 1940s, Herrmann had played Raff's 3rd and 5th Symphonies in his CBS radio broadcasts. In May 1970, Herrmann conducted the world premiere recording of Raff's Fifth Symphony Lenore for the Unicorn label, which he mainly financed himself. The recording did not attract much notice in its time, despite receiving excellent reviews, but is now considered a major turning-point in the rehabilitation of Raff as a composer.

In 1996, Sony Classical released a recording of Herrmann's music, The Film Scores, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen. This disc received the 1998 Cannes Classical Music Award for "Best 20th-Century Orchestral Recording." It was also nominated for the 1998 Grammy Award for "Best Engineered Album, Classical." In 2004 Sony Classical re-released this superb recording at a budget price in its "Great Performances" series (SNYC 92767SK).

Decca has reissued on CD a series of Phase 4 Stereo recordings with Herrmann conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra mostly in excerpts from his various film scores, including one devoted to music from several of the Hitchcock films (including Psycho, Marnie and Vertigo). In the liner notes for the Hitchcock Phase 4 album, Herrmann said that the suite from The Trouble with Harry was a "portrait of Hitch". Another album was devoted to his fantasy film scores—a few of them being the films of the special effects animator Ray Harryhausen, including music from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and The Three Worlds of Gulliver. His other Phase 4 Stereo LPs of the 1970s included Music from the Great Film Classics (suites and excerpts from Jane Eyre, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Citizen Kane and The Devil and Daniel Webster); and "The Fantasy World of Bernard Herrmann" (Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Fahrenheit 451.)

Fellow composers Richard Band, Graeme Revell, Christopher Young, Danny Elfman and Brian Tyler consider Herrmann to be a major inspiration. In 1985, Richard Band's opening theme to Re-Animator borrows heavily from Herrmann's opening score to Psycho. In 1990, Graeme Revell had adapted Herrmann's music from Psycho for its television sequel-prequel Psycho IV: The Beginning. Revell's early orchestral music during the early nineties, such as Child's Play 2 (which its music score being a reminiscent of Herrmann's scores to the 1973 film Sisters, due to the synthesizers incorporated in the chilling parts of the orchestral score) as well as the 1963 The Twilight Zone episode "Living Doll" (which inspired the Child's Play franchise), were very similar to Herrmann's work. Also, Revell's score for the video game Call of Duty 2 was very much a reminiscent of Herrmann's very rare WWII music scores such as The Naked and the Dead and Battle of Neretva. Young, who was a jazz drummer at first, listened to Herrmann's works which convinced him to be a film composer. Elfman has said he first became interested in film music upon seeing The Day the Earth Stood Still, and he paid homage to that score in his music for Mars Attacks! Tyler's score for Bill Paxton's film Frailty was greatly influenced by Herrmann's film music.

Sir George Martin, best known for producing and often adding orchestration to The Beatles music, cites Herrmann as an influence in his own work, particularly in Martin's scoring of the Beatles' song "Eleanor Rigby". Martin later expanded on this as an extended suite for McCartney's 1984 film Give My Regards to Broad Street, which features a very recognizable hommage to Herrmann's score for Psycho.

Avant-garde composer/saxophonist/producer John Zorn, in the biographical film A Bookshelf on Top of the Sky, cited Bernard Herrmann as one of his favorite composers and a major influence.

Elmer Bernstein adapted and arranged Herrmann's original score from J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear (1962), and used it for the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake. After Bernstein realized there was not enough music in the score from the original film, he added sections from Herrmann's unused score for Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, including the music composed for the murder of the character "Gromek". The score for Cape Fear evokes both the gathering clouds of the destructive hurricane and the murderous intent of killer Max Cady. Bernstein also recorded Herrmann's score for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which was released in 1975 on the Varese Sarabande label later reissued on CD in the 1990s.

Charles Gerhardt conducted a 1974 RCA recording entitled "The Classic Film Scores of Bernard Herrmann" with the National Philharmonic Orchestra. It featured Suites from Citizen Kane (with Kiri te Kanawa singing the 'Salammbo' aria) and White Witch Doctor, along with music from On Dangerous Ground, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, and the Hangover Square Piano Concerto.

During his last years in England, between 1966 and 1975, Herrmann made several LPs of other composers' music for assorted record labels. These included Phase 4 Stereo recordings of Gustav Holst's The Planets and Charles Ives's 2nd Symphony, as well as an album entitled "The Impressionists" (music by Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Fauré and Honegger) and another entitled "The Four Faces of Jazz" (works by Weill, Gershwin, Stravinsky and Milhaud). As well as recording his own film music in Phase 4 Stereo he made LPs of movie scores by others, such as "Great Shakespearean Films" (music by Shostakovich for Hamlet, Walton for Richard III and Rózsa for Julius Caesar), and "Great British Film Music" (movie scores by Lambert, Bax, Benjamin, Walton, Vaughan Williams, and Bliss).

For Unicorn Records, he recorded several of his own concert-hall works, including the cantata Moby Dick, his opera Wuthering Heights, his Symphony, and the suites Welles Raises Kane and The Devil and Daniel Webster.

Pristine Audio has released two CDs of Herrmann's radio broadcasts. One is devoted to a CBS programme from 1945 that features music by Handel, Vaughan Williams and Elgar; the other is devoted to works by Charles Ives, Robert Russell Bennett and Herrmann himself.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Contents

Accolades[edit]

Academy Awards[edit]

These awards and nominations are recorded by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences:

American Film Institute[edit]

In 2005 the American Film Institute respectively ranked Herrmann's scores for Psycho and Vertigo #4 and #12 on their list of the 25 greatest film scores. His scores for the following films were also nominated for the list:

British Academy Film Awards[edit]

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In popular culture[edit]

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Film scores[edit]

Radio scores[edit]

Melodrams[edit]

These works are for narrator and full orchestra, intended to be broadcast over the radio (since a human voice would not be able to be heard over the full volume of an orchestra). In a 1938 broadcast, Herrmann distinguished "melodrama" from "melodram" and explained that these works are not part of the former, but the latter. The 1935 works were composed before June 1935.

Incidental music for radio shows and dramas[edit]

Stage works[edit]

Concert works[edit]

Selected bibliography[edit]