Bernard Herrmann
and the Music of Desire
Steven C. Smith
“My Obsession score has two distinct elements: romance and tension.
They usually go hand in hand.”
—Bernard Herrmann
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F
rom his first film score (Citizen Kane, 1941) to the work finished hours before his death
(Taxi Driver, 1976), composer Bernard Herrmann was cinema’s unrivaled master of
revealing character psychology in music. Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Miklos Rozsa and Franz Waxman may have been equally gifted, and certainly they were
better liked; but a score by Herrmann did more than intensify a film’s emotion. It could create a
musical portrait that conveyed as much about a figure onscreen as dialogue and direction.
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His career encompassed radio, film, television, and the concert
hall. The cinematic genres in which he worked ranged from traditional drama to fantasy to science fiction. But the composer, whose
centenary is being celebrated worldwide this year with film festivals
and concerts, remains best known for scores that explore the darkest
side of human nature. Many intersect with the themes and obsessions of noir.
On Dangerous Ground (1952), directed by Nicholas Ray and
produced by Herrmann’s friend John Houseman, may be the most
canonical example. As he would throughout his 35-year film career,
Herrmann carefully chose his instruments to illuminate character.
Here he selected the viola d’amore, a stringed instrument popular in
the baroque era, as the musical voice of Ida Lupino’s blind heroine,
Mary Malden, because of the “veiled quality” of its sound. For the
score’s climactic cue, “The Death Hunt,” Herrmann used no fewer
than eight horn players, pushed to their limit playing rapid-fire triplet figures, to suggest the animal ferocity of the chase pitting cop
Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) against a murderer (Sumner Williams) he
hopes to save from a victim’s vengeful father (Ward Bond).
In 1957’s The Wrong Man—one of eight collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock—Herrmann transforms the plucked rhythm of the
bass played by nightclub musician Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda)
into a ghostly, ticking nemesis on the soundtrack; it echoes each step
of Manny’s prosecution for a crime he didn’t commit. A dissonant
cluster of muted trumpets tracks the mental breakdown of Manny’s
wife Rose (Vera Miles). Only when Rose is released from an institution in the film’s last moments are the trumpets freed from their
mutes to produce a clear, liberated sound.
Herrmann’s ability to translate feelings of entrapment, anxiety,
and romantic yearning into music surfaced early. Born in New York
City on June 29, 1911, the son of a successful Russian Jewish optometrist, he studied at Juilliard and NYU. Herrmann would learn more,
however, during his restless, first-hand
explorations of the musical wonders New York offered in the 1920s
and 1930s. With best friend (and future film composer) Jerome Moross,
“Benny” snuck into Toscanini-Philharmonic concerts. He launched combative friendships with rising contemporaries like Aaron Copland and Oscar
Levant. He debated Russian composers
with George Gershwin while the latter
wrote Porgy and Bess. (Another neighborhood friend, Abraham Polonsky,
would later write the John Garfield
noir classic Force of Evil.)
Formed early was Herrmann’s selfimage as an uncompromising outsider
in a world of conformists and Machiavellis. “Sparrows fly in flocks,” he
would say, quoting Tolstoy. “Eagles fly
alone.” Musically he found a role model
in Hector Berlioz, the tempestuous
19th-century composer whose Treatise
on Orchestration introduced Benny
to a world of dramatic musical effects
and rare instruments. A favorite Berlioz piece was the nightmarish “Symphonie Fantastique,” which describes an opium user’s dream of murdering his beloved, then paying
the price on the guillotine.
In 1933, a staff job as composer/conductor at CBS Radio gave
Herrmann the ultimate training ground for his later career in Hollywood. Radio drama was a new medium. Commercial restraints
were few, and experimentation was encouraged. Over the next two
decades, he would score hundreds of radio shows, most broadcast
live and many drawn from popular crime fiction.
Dashiell Hammett inspired two of the best. 1939’s Campbell
Playhouse adaptation of The Glass Key starred 24-year-old Orson
Welles, the Playhouse’s producer/director, as charismatic, corrupt
politician Paul Madvig—a performance enhanced by Herrmann’s
original cues and bluesy source tunes. The program aired five months
The composer’s onscreen credit in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man
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The fiery performance of Herrmann’s “Concerto Macabre” is the climax of the classic horror-noir Hangover Square
after Welles and Herrmann—temperamental innovators who became
close friends—crafted their most notorious radio show: The War of
the Worlds. (The Glass Key can be heard online at http://sounds.
mercurytheatre.info/mercury/390310.mp3).
In 1942, Herrmann scored a Hammett short story that was more
explicitly noir-themed. Two Sharp Knives aired on Suspense, the anthology series that opened each week with Benny’s graveyard-dirge
theme. Stuart Erwin starred as a shrewd, small-town police chief who
unravels a murder scheme crafted by one of his own officers. The
tale’s tension is heightened by brief but essential commentary from
Herrmann: rising/falling patterns for muted brass, low woodwinds
and tremolo strings. It reflects Herrmann’s lifelong technique of using short musical phrases, often repeated in a pattern, with growing
intensity: his fondness for orchestral color is defined by the elimination or increasing of specific instruments. (Two Sharp Knives can be
heard online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzFDb3HElEA)
Also in 1942, the 30-year-old composer achieved an unprecedented
feat in Hollywood, earning Academy Award nominations for his first
and second film scores: Citizen Kane and All That Money Can Buy
(aka The Devil and Daniel Webster). The latter won. With camerawork inspired by German Expressionism, and themes of entrapment
and isolation—Kane by his growing power, farmer Jabez Stone by his
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seven-year pact with Satan—each film mixes noir sensibilities with
other genres (biography and fantasy, respectively). Their escalating
sense of suffocation is driven by Herrmann’s music, which constantly
reminds us of the price waiting to be paid by the story’s protagonists.
Herrmann and Welles’s partnership in radio had convinced the directing wunderkind to bring his friend to Hollywood in 1940, when
filming began on Kane. Welles hoped that Herrmann would provide
innovations on the soundtrack that would match his own. It was a
challenge Herrmann embraced and fulfilled.
Dies Irae, an ancient Gregorian chant of death, is the foundation of his Kane score; a variant of this melody serves as the recurring leitmotif for Charles Foster Kane. It “seemed to suggest to me
what the subject of Kane was, which is ‘All is vanity,’” Herrmann
explained. The score also offers early clues to the film’s two mysteries: who was Kane, and what was Rosebud? Herrmann answers
the second question before the film is half over: his “Rosebud”
theme is heard just before and after the dying tycoon says the word,
then returns to underscore young Charles’s snow ride on his treasured sled. “The music has told [the audience] right away,” Herrmann observed. “The score, like the film, works like a jigsaw.”
That theme returns as a fortissimo cry of anguish during Rosebud’s
incineration, in one of cinema’s most perfect fusions of sound and
Other Sounds of Noir
During the 1940s and ‘50s, approaches to scoring crime drama were as diverse as the
cultural backgrounds of its top practitioners. Here are some of the most memorable.
image to convey immutable loss.
Four years after Citizen Kane, Herrmann—
now an established concert, film, and radio composer - summoned the musical furies that guide
another antihero to his doom, in the gothic noir
Hangover Square (1945). Laird Cregar stars as
George Henry Bone, a composer in Edwardian
London whose lust for a conniving music hall
singer (Linda Darnell)—and a brain disorder triggered by high-pitched sounds—spark a murder
spree—one that ends in conflagration during the
premiere of Bone’s piano concerto.
Producer Robert Bassler and director John
Brahm (The Brasher Doubloon, The Locket) enlisted Herrmann to write the single-movement
Concerto Macabre prior to filming. The complete
work is performance at the film’s climax, but its
themes are the basis of the underscore throughout; most memorable is a low-octave figuration
for piano, evoking the licking flames that engulf a
pawnbroker, Darnell’s femme fatale … and Bone
himself.
One moviegoer fascinated by the concerto
was 15-year-old Stephen Sondheim. The future Broadway composer/lyricist memorized the
piece’s opening and wrote Herrmann a fan letter
(he received a friendly response). Three decades
later, Sondheim’s desire to “write a musical with a
kind of Bernard Herrmann score” resulted in his
masterwork, Sweeney Todd.
By 1951, radio drama in New York was dying. The CBS Symphony that Herrmann led in
concert broadcasts was disbanded. A new home
and career beckoned in Los Angeles. Now working almost exclusively in film and television, the
composer worked in a range of screen genres,
from literary adaptations (The Snows of Kilimanjaro) to groundbreaking sci-fi (The Day the Earth
Stood Still). He wrote ingenious small-ensemble
scores for American radio’s last great drama series: Crime Classics, a darkly witty survey of history’s most notorious murders, from Julius Caesar to Lizzie Borden.
Herrmann responded most intensely to stories
of thwarted desire (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
London-born Adolph Deutsch (1897–1980) may be the most unjustly overlooked
of Golden Age composers. Against an image of the black bird, Deutsch scores Falcon’s main title with an eerie, exotic theme representing the mysterious title object
and its Spanish origins. The theme becomes a musical question mark—one that pervades the soundtrack to suggest both lost treasure and the obsessive, futile quest to
possess it.
Double Indemnity (1944)
As a shadowy figure on crutches moves toward us and the title card appears, Hungarian Miklos Rozsa (1907–1995) delivers his own death march: a loping theme for
low brass whose subtle dissonance proved a subject of controversy. Paramount music
director Louis Lipstone hated its “Carnegie Hall” pretensions, and “asked why I hadn’t
written something attractive,” Rozsa recalled. “I replied that Billy Wilder’s film was
about ugly people doing vicious things to each other.” Lipstone did his best to have the
score dropped—until after the first preview, when Paramount production head Buddy
De Sylva praised its hard-hitting power. Rozsa watched, bemused, as Lipstone threw
his arm around De Sylva and replied, “Don’t I always get you the right man?”
The Big Sleep (1946)
If Austrian native Max Steiner (1888–1971) didn’t invent the rules of film scoring,
he perfected them in dozens of early talkies for RKO and Warner Bros. By the time he
tackled Howard Hawks’s version of Raymond Chandler, Steiner had perfected his style
of creating leitmotivs (recurring themes) to define characters and situations. The surprise
is that his European vernacular works so well in everything from westerns to noir—even
if his theme for Philip Marlowe sounds like a German-American cousin of Strauss’s Till
Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. The score’s finale, where a swooning Bogie-Bacall love
theme is joined by police siren obbligato as the couple kisses, is as witty as it is sexy.
D.O.A. (1950)
Bernard Herrmann believed that “a composer’s first job is to get inside the drama.”
The music of Dimitri Tiomkin (1894–1979) takes the exact opposite approach: the Russian composer excelled at flamboyant, fortissimo statements of a drama’s externals, hitting home an idea that is already told visually. D.O.A. is no exception: Tiomkin even
throws in a wolf whistle for the walk-by of a comely female. Still, his sledgehammer
neo-romanticism lifts movies like D.O.A. so far above reality that the effect is undeniably
powerful. His soundtracks are as explosive and effective as a Tommy gun blast.
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Franz Waxman (1906–1967) knew evil first-hand. Beaten in the street by Nazis in
his native Germany, he fled to Hollywood, where he scored two of the most beautiful
monsters in movies: The Bride of Frankenstein and Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd.
In the style of countryman Kurt Weill, Waxman uses a jaded tune for saxophone to
evoke the moral slide of screenwriter Joe Gillis, and paraphrases Richard Strauss’s
Salome— Norma’s dream project—for a theme that tells us exactly how the forgotten film star sees herself and the world around her. The result was an Oscar win, and
a score that comingles beauty and horror. As Waxman knew from Berlin, nothing is
as scary as a dream that turns to madness, then murder.
—Steven C. Smith
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stod from Tristan und Isolde, since Scottie is by
now a man in love with death; years later, Herrmann recalled with pride Hitch’s description of
how this perverse love scene would be staged:
“We’ll just have the camera and you.”
“I think that we’re all in our private traps—
clamped in them, and none of us can escape.”
—Norman Bates in Psycho,
screenplay by Joseph Stefano
Alfred Hitchcock warily considers his favorite overworked compose
Obsession), suspenseful pursuit (Five Fingers, North by Northwest)
and psychological disorder (A Hatful of Rain, Marnie). Fueling his
empathy for the tragic side of life was his own growing pessimism
and anger. By the 1960s, his dreams of a conducting career and of
producing his grand opera Wuthering Heights were largely crushed.
Casualties of his explosive temper included countless professional
relationships and two marriages—first to writer Lucille Fletcher
(Sorry, Wrong Number), then to Fletcher’s cousin, Lucy Anderson.
A third marriage to Norma Shepherd, a BBC producer 29 years Herrmann’s junior, survived similar storms until his death.
If Herrmann was unable to control his rage, he could still channel his anxieties into music of striking psychological force. The ultimate outlet was his decade-long partnership with Alfred Hitchcock,
launched with The Trouble with Harry (1955).
Hitchcock involved his favorite composer from the start of each
project, adjusting his approach to sound design and pacing to reflect
Herrmann’s input. That trust would shape two of their most influential collaborations: Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960).
Homicidal transvestites, matricide, and onscreen gore were uncharted turf in late 1959
when Psycho was shot. Hitchcock hedged his
bets with a modest budget, including less money
than usual for music. Herrmann embraced the
limitation, foregoing woodwinds, brass, and
percussion to write a score for string orchestra
only. His reason for the selection: “to complement the black-andwhite photography of the film with a black-and-white score.”
During Psycho’s first 40 minutes, charting the doomed flight of
secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) after stealing 40,000 dollars, it
is the role of the music to “tell the audience, who don’t know something terrible is going to happen to the girl, that it’s got to.” Herrmann’s main title immediately sets the tone, with its stabbing opening chords and frenetic rhythm that pulses like a skipping heartbeat.
This music returns to stalk Marion from the start of her panicked
exodus to her rain-drenched arrival at the Bates Motel.
“All of this will naturally depend upon what music Mr. Herrmann
puts over this sequence.”
—Hitchcock production notes on Vertigo
Music communicates character and story from the first seconds
of Vertigo’s score. Herrmann’s main title Prelude opens with a hypnotic, rising/falling triplet pattern for winds and strings. It describes
both the fear of heights and the emotional disorientation that will
cripple detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), as he falls in love
with a woman destined for death.
Over that triplet ostinato (the term for a repeated musical pattern), Herrmann adds a plunging, two-note motif for horn that
evokes the nightmarish series of falling bodies that motivate the
story from its first scene to its last.
Much of Vertigo plays without dialogue, achieving tension on the
soundtrack almost solely through music. These sequences include
Scottie’s shadowing of the mysterious Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak); Madeleine’s apparent death; and most unforgettably the “recognition scene,” as Judy Barton, Madeleine’s double, embraces Scottie while dressed as her dead alter ego.
Herrmann’s climbing strings deliberately echo Wagner’s Liebe-
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Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s Vertigo may be his most psychologically complex
heavy soundtracks (and the hit albums they might yield). It took a new
generation of directors led by Brian
De Palma, Larry Cohen, and Martin
Scorsese to rediscover him. By 1975
Herrmann was busier than ever.
That December 24th, hours after
Taxi Driver’s last recording session,
the 64-year-old composer—weakened by heart disease, but creatively
undimmed—returned to his hotel
room in Universal City, not far from
the moonlit façade of the Bates Motel. “What are we doing here,” he
sighed to Norma, before closing his
eyes one last time and surrendering
all battles with the world. ■
Steven C. Smith is the author of A
Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and
Music of Bernard Herrmann (University of California Press, 1991).
Psycho would prove to be the composer’s most sonically iconic score
Although Hitchcock asked for no music during the film’s notorious shower scene, Herrmann characteristically followed his own
instinct. The resulting cue—which Hitchcock loved—was simple to
perform and multilayered in meaning. Its slashing sound is created
solely by violins, but evokes Norman’s knife, Marion’s screams, Norman’s stuffed birds (another Herrmann clue to a film’s denouement),
and, to quote the composer, sheer “terror.”
Psycho concludes with much exposition but no resolution. Marion’s desperate attempt to “buy happiness” ends in annihilation. A
handsome young man grins a deaths-head smile inside his own private trap, his identity forever lost. Daringly, Herrmann reinforces
Psycho’s lack of closure by ending with a violent unresolved chord.
It was an approach he used again in his final score, Taxi Driver
(1976)—another portrait of alienation and romantic obsession
which briefly quotes Psycho’s score, while offering a new sound for
the composer: a melancholy jazz theme for tenor sax. Herrmann intended the theme “to show that this was where [cabbie Travis Bickle’s] fantasies about women led him,” recalled co-producer Michael
Phillips. “His illusions, his self-perpetuating way of dealing with
women had finally brought him to that bloody, violent outburst ... I
had never thought of it in terms of what Benny said, but Bobby [De
Niro] and I both said, ‘God, he’s right.’ Absolutely. Perfect.”
The theme is as melodically seductive as it is unnerving in its
dramatic use. “Herrmann knew how lovely the dark should be,”
observes David Thomson in his New Biographical Dictionary of
Film. “He was at his best in rites of dismay, dark dreams, introspection, and the gloomy romance of loneliness. No one else would have
dared or known to make the score for Taxi Driver such a lament for
impossible love. Try that film without the music and the violence is
nearly unbearable. Yet the score … is universally cinematic: it speaks
to sitting in the dark, full of dread and desire, watching.”
By the time of its composition, Hermann had been exiled for a decade in London, largely forgotten by an industry that now preferred pop-
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