Bernard Herrmann

• Born: June 29, 1911
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: December 24, 1975
• Place of death: Norht Hollywood, California

Musician, composer, and conductor

An unparalleled musicologist, Herrmann became an outstanding composer of film music. He wrote the music for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane in 1940 and for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960.

Areas of achievement: Music; entertainment

Early Life

Bernard Herrmann (bur-NAHRD HUR-mehn) was born on June 29, 1911, to Abraham and Ida Herrmann, Russian Jewish immigrants whose families had settled in New York in the 1880’s. A premature baby, Bernard Herrmann was the first of three children and his mother’s favorite. At age five, he contracted St. Vitus’s dance (Sydenham’s chorea), a neurological disorder that primarily attacks children, and he barely survived.

Because their father favored the arts over religious training, the children were given musical instruments at an early age. Young Herrmann began playing the violin at five and took violin lessons until thirteen; at eleven, he composed his first opera. An awkward, socially inept child, he retreated from the taunting and harassment of his classmates to the New York Public Library, where he read nineteenth century English literature.

Herrmann entered DeWitt Clinton High School in 1927, and by the end of his second year there, he learned that he would not graduate on time. He considered studies less important than sneaking into Carnegie Hall to watch various conductors at work or forming a trio and performing at select locations. In addition, Herrmann was composing some of his first pieces; in 1927, he was awarded one hundred dollars in a high school song competition. That same year, he began studies with composition teacher Gustav Heine.

While still in high school, Herrmann enrolled in New York University’s fine arts school to study composition and conducting. His concert compositions during this time period already exhibited his characteristic use of color and chromatic progressions in the creation of dramatic atmosphere. These concert works would later be replaced with shorter pieces for radio, film, and television, which would showcase Herrmann’s skill at uniting music with drama.

With the death of his father in 1933, and the deepening gloom of the Great Depression, he realized he needed artistic satisfaction and money. He soon signed a contract with the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) to arrange, conduct, and program music for the radio, and, in three and a half years, he established a wide audience. In 1938, Herrmann joined CBS’s The Mercury Theatre on the Air, as composer-conductor, where he met Orson Welles, who asked Herrmann to write the music for his first film, Citizen Kane, in 1940.

Life’s Work

With the success of Welles’s Citizen Kane, assisted in no small part by Herrmann’s music, Herrmann supplied the film music for William Dieterle’s All That Money Can Buy (1941), for which Herrmann received an Academy Award. His next undertaking, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942),was also to be directed by Welles, but the success of the first film was not repeated. Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) Pictures denied Welles the final edit and cut forty-three minutes of the film and thirty-one minutes of Herrmann’s fifty-eight-minute score. RKO assigned a staff composer to create a new finale. Herrmann, threatening a lawsuit, immersed himself in composing, conducting, and programming music for CBS.

Herrmann scored the brooding, melancholy music for Jane Eyre (1944), and, in so doing, he returned to his beloved world of English literature. He had begun work on his only opera, Wuthering Heights (1982), in 1943, and it required eight years to finish and took a heavy toll on his relationships, particularly his marriage to Lucille Fletcher, which ended in 1948. As chief conductor of the CBS Symphony, Herrmann continued to produce American music for radio and to create Romantic music in film. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), one of Herrmann’s most eloquent scores, became his personal favorite. In 1951, the CBS Symphony was disbanded, and the network’s priority became television.

After working on several projects in Hollywood, Herrmann teamed with Alfred Hitchcock in 1954, initiating a productive collaboration. Their first venture was The Trouble with Harry (1955), followed by Hitchcock’s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and The Wrong Man (1956). In Vertigo (1958), viewed by many as Hitchcock’s finest film, Herrmann incorporated his favorite themes of isolation, obsession, and endless yearning. In 1959, Herrmann scored the music for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, opening with a fandango and maintaining silence for the dramatic crop-dusting scene. Hitchcock, impressed with the results, persuaded Herrmann to use an electronic device in lieu of music four years later with The Birds (1963). In 1960, Herrmann scored the music for Hitchcock’s Psycho and Marnie (1964). In 1966, Herrmann and Hitchcock fell out, and Herrmann forfeited the scoring assignment for Torn Curtain (1966).

In 1959, Herrmann began work for Rod Serling on The Twilight Zone, and Hermann provided music for the first year of the show’s five-year run. Serling’s perceptions of human experience visualized in fables, allegories, and nightmares were perfectly suited to Herrmann’s atmospheric music that emphasized alienation and tension. Much like Hitchcock, Serling provided Herrmann with an opportunity to work outside the norm.

In addition to his work for Hitchcock’s films, Herrmann turned out distinctive music for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1959), Mysterious Island (1961), Cape Fear (1962), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Sisters (1973), Obsession (1976), and Taxi Driver (1976). Herrmann died of cardiovascular disease on December 24, 1975, the night following the completion of the score for Taxi Driver.

Significance

At the time of Herrmann’s first scoring success, Citizen Kane, film music was essentially uniform in style and structure. Herrmann, however, always an individualist, used distinctive orchestration to emphasize theme and character, a practice he continued throughout his career. Ignoring the long melodic phrasing used by many of his peers, he valued understatement and employed short phrasing that could be transformed throughout the piece to indicate psychological complexity. His fragmented scores seemed to reflect his own complexity. His personal life, frustrated by divorces, broken friendships, bitter and angry collaborative endings, pushed him to search obsessively for an ideal that could be realized in his music. His work in radio, television, and cinema gives his music its enduring resonance and makes him one of the most imitated of all film musicians.

Bibliography

Davis, Richard. Complete Guide to Film Scoring. Boston: Berklee Press, 1999. Book serves as a good introduction to those interested in film music or as a reference work. Contains nineteen interviews with composers.

Larsen, Peter. Film Music. Translated by John Irons. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Probes the relationship between film and music; also contains an examination of Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

Smith, Steven C. A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Excellently documented biography, with an overview of the accomplishments of Herrmann. Includes photographs, correspondence, papers, interviews, and recollections of a large number of people who knew Herrmann well.

Timm, Larry M. The Soul of Cinema: An Appreciation of Film Music. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Education, 2003. Study of the utilization of music in various motion pictures and of the scores of numerous composers and the characteristics of their music. Includes pertinent information on Herrmann.