Bernard Herrmann
Bernard Herrmann (born Maximillian Herman; June 29, 1911 – December 24, 1975) was an American composer and conductor[1] best known for his work in composing for films. As a conductor, he championed the music of lesser-known composers. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest film composers.[2] 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."[3]
Not to be confused with the sometime conductor of the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra, Bernard Joseph Herrmann.
Bernard Herrmann
June 29, 1911
December 24, 1975 (aged 64)
Bernard Maximillian Herrmann
- Composer
- conductor
1934–1975
2
1941 Academy Award for
Music Score of a Dramatic Picture, The Devil and Daniel Webster a.k.a. All That Money Can Buy
1976 BAFTA Award for
Best Film Music, Taxi Driver
An Academy Award-winner for The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Herrmann is known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, notably The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) (where he makes a cameo as the conductor at Royal Albert Hall), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963) (as "sound consultant") and Marnie (1964). He worked in radio drama, composing for Orson Welles's The Mercury Theater on the Air, and his first film score was for Welles's film debut, Citizen Kane (1941). His other credits include Jane Eyre (1943), 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). Herrmann scored films that were inspired by Hitchcock, like François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968) and Brian De Palma's Sisters (1972) and Obsession (1976). He composed the scores for several fantasy films by Ray Harryhausen, and composed for television, including Have Gun – Will Travel and Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. His last score, recorded shortly before his death, was for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).[4][5]
Early life and career[edit]
Herrmann was born in New York City as Maximillian Herman, the son of a Jewish middle-class family of Russian origin.[1][6] He was the son of Ida (Gorenstein)[7] and Abram Dardik, who was from Ukraine and had changed the family name. Herrmann attended high school at DeWitt Clinton High School, an all-boys public school at that time on 10th Avenue and 59th Street in New York City.[8] 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 20, formed his own orchestra, the New Chamber Orchestra of New York.[4]
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 audiences 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 of England, 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 films 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 Academy Award. In 1947, Herrmann scored the atmospheric music for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. In 1951, his score for The Day the Earth Stood Still featured the theremin.
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. They had two daughters: Dorothy (born 1941) and Wendy (born 1945).
Fletcher was to become a noted radio scriptwriter, 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 until 1964.[9]
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 The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, Mysterious Island and The 3 Worlds of Gulliver. His score for The 7th Voyage was highly acclaimed by admirers of that genre of film and was praised by Harryhausen as Herrmann's best score of the four.
During the same period, Herrmann turned his talents to writing scores for television shows. 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.
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.[27]
Herrmann's last film scores included Sisters and Obsession for Brian De Palma. His final film soundtrack, and the last work he completed, 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. He returned to his hotel, and died from an apparent heart attack in his sleep the next day.[28] Scorsese and Cohen both dedicated their respective films in his memory. Herrmann was interred in Beth David Cemetery at Elmont, New York.
Other works[edit]
As well as his many film scores, Herrmann wrote several concert pieces, including his 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. He recorded all these compositions, and several others, for the Unicorn label during his last years in London. A work written late in his life, Souvenir de Voyages, showed his ability to write non-programmatic pieces.
Herrmann's work for television includes scores for such westerns as Cimarron Strip, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Have Gun – Will Travel, as well as the 1968 suspense TV movie Companions in Nightmare.
For The Twilight Zone:
For the Alfred Hitchcock Hour:
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 of the Columbia Workshop,[64] 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.