Bernard Herrmann (born Maximillian Herman; June 29, 1911December 24, 1975) was an American composer and conductor best known for his work in film scoring. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest film composers of all time. 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." As a conductor, he championed the music of lesser-known composers.
As a young man, Herrmann was the chief conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra, which led him to become the composer for Orson Welles's radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. This led him to write his first film score, for Welles's directorial debut Citizen Kane (1941). That year, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Devil and Daniel Webster. He worked with Welles on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Jane Eyre (1943). He worked with Alfred Hitchcock on nine films, including The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956, where he makes a cameo appearance at the Royal Albert Hall), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963, as "sound consultant") and Marnie (1964).
His other credits include Anna and the King of Siam (1946), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Cape Fear (1962), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Twisted Nerve (1968). He composed the scores for several fantasy films featuring the work of animator Ray Harryhausen and composed for television, including Have Gun – Will Travel and Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. Towards the end of his career, Herrmann scored the Hitchcock-inspired films François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968) and Brian De Palma's Sisters (1972) and Obsession (1976). His final score, recorded shortly before his death, was for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976). His career is chronicled in Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann (1992).
Early life and education Herrmann was born on June 29, 1911, in New York City as Maximillian Herman, the son of a Jewish middle-class family of Russian origin. He was the son of Ida (née Gorenstein) and Abram Dardik, who was from Ukraine and had changed the family name. Herrmann attended DeWitt Clinton High School, an all-boys public school in New York. His father encouraged music activity, taking him to the opera, and encouraging him to learn the violin. At thirteen he discovered Hector Berlioz's Treatise on Instrumentation, which was an important influence. After winning a composition prize, he decided to concentrate on music, and went to New York University, where he studied with Percy Grainger and Philip James. He later studied at the Juilliard School and, at the age of 20, formed the New Chamber Orchestra of New York. He befriended composers Aaron Copland and George Gershwin.
Career Herrmann was hired as an assistant to Johnny Green, host of Music in the Modern Manner. He composed incidental music for Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci". He conducted rehearsals of musicians, including Benny Goodman. 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 audiences than any other conductor – he was a particular champion of Charles Ives, who 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 Music of Famous Amateurs, including such royals as Frederick the Great, Henry VIII, Charles I of England, Louis XIII and writers like John Milton, Samuel Pepys and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Herrmann's many US broadcast premieres during the 1940s included Nikolai Myaskovsky's 22nd Symphony, Gian Francesco Malipiero's 3rd Symphony, Richard Arnell's 1st Symphony, Edmund Rubbra's 3rd Symphony and Ives's 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." 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. Barbirolli conducted the premiere of Herrmann's cantata Moby Dick, dedicated to Ives. He scored The March of Time, Lights Out and a radio adaptation of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Collaborations with Orson Welles
While at CBS, Herrmann met Orson Welles and went on to write and arrange scores for Welles's The Mercury Theatre on the Air and The Campbell Playhouse, which adapted literature and film to radio. 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.
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. The aria from the fictional opera Salammbô, which Kane's wife Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) 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 used techniques he had learned in radio: "The movies frequently overlook opportunities for musical cues which last only a few seconds—that is, from five to fifteen seconds at the most-the reason being that the eye usually covers the transition. On the other hand, in radio drama, every scene must be bridged by some sort of sound device, so that even five seconds of music becomes a vital instrument in telling the ear that the scene is shifting." On his use of leitmotifs in the score, he remarked: "I am not a great believer in the 'leitmotiv' as a device for motion picture music-but in this film its use was practically imperative, because of the story itself and the manner in which it is unfolded."
Herrmann also scored Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); 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.Husted, Christopher, liner notes for The Magnificent Ambersons: Original 1942 Motion Picture Score, Preamble (PRCD 1783), Fifth Continent Music Corp. 1990 Herrmann was music director for 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).Radio Music , The Bernard Herrmann Web Pages; retrieved 17 June 2012. Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that "Benny Herrmann was an intimate member of the family".
Between the films by Welles, he scored William Dieterle's The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), for which he won his only Academy Award. He recalled layering four violin tracks on top of each other, and "another effect which we got from recording the sound of singing telephone wires at 4 a.m. It was always used whenever the devil (Walter Huston) appears."
Herrmann used large sections of his score for The Campbell Playhouse adaptation of Rebecca for Robert Stevenson's Jane Eyre (1943), the third film in which Welles starred. Other notable scores of the decade include John Brahm's Hangover Square (1945) and John Cromwell's Anna and the King of Siam (1946). His score for Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) was a personal favorite.
Herrmann rebutted the charges Pauline Kael made in her 1971 essay "Raising Kane", which revived controversy over the authorship of the screenplay for Citizen Kane. He reworked music from the film in Orson Welles Raises Kane.
Collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock
Herrmann is most closely associated with his work with Alfred Hitchcock. He worked on the scores for nine Hitchcock films, from The Trouble with Harry (1955) to Marnie (1964). Hitchcock had wanted Herrmann to score Rear Window (1954), but he was unavailable; the film's unique diegetic music was instead provided by Franz Waxman.
The score for The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) was composed by Herrmann, but two of the most significant pieces in the film – the song "Que Será, Será" and the Storm Clouds Cantata – were not (although he did re-orchestrate Arthur Benjamin's cantata from Hitchcock's 1934 original). The film gave Herrmann the opportunity for a cameo as the conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra in the Royal Albert Hall scene. Herrmann's The Wrong Man score (1956) is in a jazz style and makes heavy use of double bass; Emmanuel Balestrero (Henry Fonda), the wrong man of the title, is a jazz bassist.
His score for Vertigo (1958) is considered by many to be his masterpiece. In many key scenes, Hitchcock let Herrmann's score take center stage. Frequently echoing Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, it dramatically conveys the protagonist'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 to Wagner "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." According to Dan Auiler, Herrmann deeply regretted being unable to conduct his composition for Vertigo; a musicians' strike in the US meant that it was actually conducted in England and Austria by Muir Mathieson. Herrmann always conducted his own music where possible, and given that he considered the Vertigo score among his best work, he regarded it as a missed opportunity.
Herrmann's most famous film music is from Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). The score uses only a string orchestra rather than a full orchestra. 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 (Anthony Perkins). Hitchcock initially wanted the film's famous shower scene to play without music; Herrmann suggested otherwise, and they screened the scene with and without music. Ultimately, Hitchcock decided to include the music. Steven Smith writes "Herrmann made Hitchcock fall in love with the project once again. Herrmann later said he wrote Psycho score for an all-strings orchestra to create 'a black-and-white sound' to complement the black-and-white photography." Herrmann recalled "The strange thing was the number of colleagues and informed members of the public who have written me letters asking what instruments I used. They couldn't recognise the sound of a string orchestra - the same kind of orchestra which plays the music of Mozart and Haydn."
Herrmann was credited as "sound consultant" on The Birds (1963), which forewent a traditional score for electronically made bird sounds.