Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins

His career bridged Welles and Scorsese, taking in Hitchcock, Truffaut, and DePalma along the way. Lir Mac Cárthaigh explores the life and work of Bernard Herrmann, one of the greatest film composers of all time. [Extract]

The Overlooked Arts
Collaboration often produces the greatest works of art. Sometimes the interaction between creative minds results in a work which neither would have been capable of alone. Unfortunately it is often easier to ascribe great works of collaboration to a single author; we bury Fletcher beneath Shakespeare, Macquet beneath Dumas, Lish beneath Carver. Today, when we listen to a minister's speech or see the latest collection from a fashion designer we don't think of the shuttered backroom where a faceless team do the work, we think only of the person who gives their official seal to it. While film is perhaps the most collaborative artform, the glory tends to accrue on the director. A mighty name like Welles, Hitchcock or Scorsese brands a film, defines it the work of an auteur, the men and women who labour in what David Thomson thoughtfully brands 'the 'subsidiary' arts' tend to be forgotten; the writers, composers, designers and all of the other artists whose contributions can make or marr the finished work. One of the above-mentioned directors, Alfred Hitchcock, thoroughly disliked sharing credit, yet on one occasion he stated that his direction accounted for only two-thirds of a film's impact, that for the final third he relied on the music of Bernard Herrmann.

Herrmann's career in movies began during Hollywood's 'golden age' and continued into the rise of the Vietnam generation of filmmakers. His first film score was written for Welles's Citizen Kane, his last for Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Herrmann was a child prodigy, he won a composition prize at 13, and founded and conducted a chamber orchestra at 20. According to his daughter Dorothy, writing music came easily to Herrmann; he would start early in the day, and would often have his work finished by nine in the morning. When still in his twenties Herrmann was hired as staff conductor for CBS Radio, where he also presented Exploring Music, a programme devoted to airing unheard and underappreciated work. At CBS Hermann made the acquaintance of the airwaves' best-known boy-wonder, Orson Welles. In his conversations with Peter Bogdanovich (later published as This Is Orson Welles) the director remembered a 1935 radio production of Hamlet which demonstrated the composer's uneven temperament. Herrmann quarrelled with director Irving Reis seconds before the play was due to go on air, he broke his conductor's baton and threw his script away. Welles managed to get Herrmann to go on with the show, but had no time to re-order his notes. The result was the music was one cue out through the entire performance: "We had fanfares when it was supposed to be quiet, approaching menace when it was supposed to be a gay party, and all live; it was riotous." Welles, who liked to work with others of his generation, felt an affinity with the young composer, and Herrmann shortly became "an intimate member of the family."

Bassoons, Beelzebub and Betrayal
Herrmann was contracted to write the music for Welles's first motion picture, but the project kept changing; Heart of Darkness became Smiler with a Knife, which finally gave way to Citizen Kane. The delay to production gave Herrmann time to compose his first symphony, featuring the heavy horns, prominent percussion and plucked strings which would become familiar features of his work. Herrmann's concert pieces already included the impressive cantata 'Moby Dick,' whose sinister Salvation Armyish hymn presents a dark evocation of Melville's novel. According to Welles, he and Herrmann worked 'almost note for note' on the Kane score, as they had done for many years on radio. The film provided a real showcase for the talents of the young composer, as it allowed him to write in many different styles, from the Souza-esque 'March of Time' newsreel parody in the 'News on the March' sequence to the burlesque song 'Oh, Mr. Kane,' which Welles claims was based on a march he heard in Mexico. The highpoint of Herrmann's score is the aria he wrote for Sallambô, the opera starring Kane's second wife Susan Alexander. Welles told Herrmann in a telegram 'here is a chance for you to do something witty and amusing,' Herrmann did so, writing the area in too high a key to show that the singer is out of her depth. The non-linear structure of Kane allowed Herrmann to flit between themes of levity and gravity; he evokes the sour dustiness of the empty Xanadu mansion with dark, doomy woodwinds, while Kane's ebullient youth at the Examiner newspaper is recalled with giddy strings and xylophone. Herrmann was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Kane, but lost - to himself - for his score for The Devil and Daniel Webster (Aka All That Money Can Buy). The Daniel Webster score saw Herrmann return to the briny depths of his 'Moby Dick' cantata, using a hornpipe-flavoured melody which contrasts bright and carefree passages with moments of doom.

Black Romantic
Herrmann continued to work with Welles on the director's ill-starred second feature The Magnificent Ambersons. Ambersons was to be even more astonishing than Citizen Kane, but was mutilated by executives at RKO. Part of the film's splendour was the lavish score, based around Emil Waldteufel's waltz 'Toujours ou jamais.' Thirty-one minutes of Herrmann's music was removed by the studio after they re-shot the ending; new music by RKO composer Roy Webb was substituted. When Herrmann viewed the studio's cut of the film he insisted that his name be removed from the credits.

The mid-1940s have been referred to as Herrmann's 'romantic period.' Scores from this time include landmark music for Jane Eyre, Hangover Square and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. The plot of Hangover Square involves a composer who suffers from bouts of murderous amnesia, and afforded Herrmann the opportunity to write the chilling, manic and intense piano concerto Macabre, performed by the deranged man in a burning auditorium. Herrmann's all-time favourite score was for Joseph Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir; he told his brother Louis that the music for the film expressed his feelings better than anything he'd done before. In the film a widow falls in love with the ghost of a sea captain; Herrmann's biographer Stephen C. Smith believes that the composer felt an affinity with the strong but lonely Mrs. Muir. Doomy woodwinds ascend, becoming strings; bright passages of piano and glockenspiel conclude in maritime bells and a harp. The dark/bright contrast used so often by Herrmann occurs as the low woodwinds and gong push their way into slow harp-led strings. An urgent, startling passage of strings foreshadow Herrmann's work on Psycho, but are modulated here by horns, finally giving way to a thematic four-note figure played on a flute. Around this time Herrmann was working on his only opera, Wuthering Heights, with a libretto by his wife Lucille, based on Emily Bronté's novel. The opera shares some of Mrs. Muir's melody and, according to his daughter Dorothy, Herrmann loved to play it, considering it his masterpiece. The composer refused to make any changes to the opera, and consequently Wuthering Heights was not performed until some years after his death.

The Bernard Herrmann Society provides an indispensible online resource where much of the material here referred to can be found archived in its entirity.

The full text of this article is printed in Film Ireland 91