BERNARD HERRMANN - Film Noir Foundation

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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 19 th -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 www.filmnoirfoundation.org I FALL 2011 I NOIR CITY 29
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 30 NOIR CITY I FALL 2011 I www.filmnoirfoundation.org 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
Page 1: Bernard Herrmann and the music of d
Page 5 and 6: Alfred Hitchcock warily considers h

BERNARD HERRMANN - Film Noir Foundation

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?