Considered by many the foremost trailblazer among those scoring motion pictures across the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Bernard Herrmann nevertheless disavowed the designation of film composer, instead describing himself simply as a musician who from time to time created scores for the screen. The characterization suited an artist who, beyond his cinematic contributions, produced pieces across numerous genres such as opera, symphony, musical comedy, and concert repertoire, while also generating abundant material for radio and television and sustaining an active conducting career that placed him before leading ensembles in New York, London, Los Angeles, and additional locales, as well as in studios where he documented many of his own works and those of fellow composers on recordings. Even so, his widest renown derived from his Academy Award-winning efforts as a movie scorer who supplied background music for 47 feature films issued between 1941 and 1976, among them enduring classics including Citizen Kane, Psycho, and Taxi Driver. Such a tally of credits fell well below the volume a typical top-tier Hollywood composer might have amassed over three and a half decades, yet Herrmann deliberately limited his screen engagements, insisting on orchestrating every score himself—an almost unprecedented approach that shaped the distinctive character of his writing. In contrast to contemporaries who, together with their arrangers, routinely deployed the full studio orchestras and thereby produced scores echoing conventional classical styles, he selected atypical instrumental combinations, frequently engaging smaller ensembles for more pronounced impact. He likewise showed scant interest in crafting standard melodic themes, favoring instead ostinatos and passages resembling dramatic sound effects that heightened suspenseful sequences in his films for director Alfred Hitchcock, or accentuated the majestic fantasy aspects in his films for producer Charles Schneer and special-effects authority Ray Harryhausen.
Born June 29, 1911, in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants Abraham Herrmann, originally Abraham Dardick, an optometrist, and Ida (Gorenstein) Herrmann, he displayed an early fascination with music, commencing violin studies in childhood and soon attempting composition. Around 1927, while enrolled at DeWitt Clinton High School, he began composition lessons with Gustav Heine. His initial significant composition, the tone poem The Forest, dates from January 1929. Still in high school, he secured admission to the fine-arts program at New York University, studying composition under Philip James and conducting under Albert Stoessel. When Stoessel assumed leadership of the opera and orchestra department at the Juilliard School of Music in fall 1930, Herrmann obtained a fellowship there, also pursuing composition and harmony with Bernard Wagenaar. He completed high school in January 1931 and remained at Juilliard until May 1932, departing without a degree. That autumn he returned briefly to NYU for lectures in advanced composition and orchestration delivered by Percy Grainger; concurrently he served as a music editor and arranger at Harms music publishing. Later that season, dancers encountered at Juilliard requested his arrangements of ballet music for their appearance in the musical revue New Americana, which unexpectedly prompted his professional composing, conducting, and Broadway debuts when he led the orchestra for his arrangement of “The Shakers” and his original “Amour à la Militaire” at the October 5, 1932 opening; the production ran 77 performances through December 10.
Amid the Depression’s depths, Herrmann and Harms orchestrator Hans Spialek assembled the New Chamber Orchestra from unemployed musicians; its inaugural concert occurred at the New School for Social Research on May 17, 1933. At this and later programs, Herrmann conducted his own compositions alongside works by numerous modern composers he championed, notably the then-obscure Charles Ives. In 1934 CBS radio hired him as an arranger and rehearsal conductor; he advanced to composer/conductor, remaining full-time for the subsequent 17 years and contributing to numerous national broadcasts. Four years into his CBS tenure he joined The Mercury Theatre on the Air, the radio counterpart of the celebrated New York theater company directed by Orson Welles and John Houseman. On October 30, 1938, he supplied the musical cues for the program’s notorious adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which persuaded many listeners that Martians were invading Earth. The following year Welles contracted with RKO to develop motion pictures and invited Herrmann to accompany him; Herrmann secured a leave from CBS and traveled westward by train. Immediately before departure he married writer Lucille Fletcher on October 2, 1939. Meanwhile his stature as a composer continued rising; his cantata Moby Dick received its concert premiere from the New York Philharmonic on April 11, 1940.
Welles explored several concepts for his debut film before choosing Citizen Kane, the fictional screen biography of newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, loosely modeled on William Randolph Hearst. In a production that defied numerous moviemaking conventions, Welles notably welcomed the composer into the project during shooting rather than solely in post-production. Welles even adjusted scenes to accommodate Herrmann’s music rather than the reverse, granting the opportunity to compose varied musical forms, including an opera aria of near-impossible vocal demands intended to underscore the shortcomings of Kane’s mistress. After the score was recorded in fall 1940, Herrmann returned to New York and CBS, focusing on the symphony jointly commissioned by the network and the New York Philharmonic. It premiered on CBS under his direction on July 27, 1941—the same day his daughter Dorothy Herrmann was born. (The New York Philharmonic presented its concert debut in fall 1942.) A second daughter, Wendy Herrmann, was born October 18, 1945. Citizen Kane opened May 1, 1941. Although initially modest in financial return, the film attained legendary status, frequently cited as cinema’s greatest achievement. While the concept of an original-motion-picture-soundtrack album lay years ahead, a soundtrack LP eventually appeared on Mark ’56 in 1980, and in 1991 the Australian Philharmonic Orchestra under Tony Bremner issued a recording on Preamble Records.
Herrmann returned to Hollywood and RKO in summer 1941 to score All That Money Can Buy (also titled The Devil and Daniel Webster). Released in October, the film, like Citizen Kane, earned a 1941 Academy Award nomination for best dramatic score; it ultimately prevailed, and on February 26, 1942, Herrmann received the Oscar on his second nomination. At the time he was composing his third score, again for Welles—The Magnificent Ambersons. The experience proved less fortunate. Although Welles and Herrmann approved the film, RKO did not; the studio recut it, altered the ending, and engaged another composer for additional music. By its August 1942 release Herrmann had demanded his name be removed from the credits. (In 1990 the Australian Philharmonic Orchestra released a recording of the complete, restored original score.)
Partly because of this episode and partly because he retained full-time CBS employment, Herrmann returned to New York in spring 1942, concentrating on radio work for programs including Suspense and, from spring 1943, Invitation to Music. He was recalled to Hollywood for an adaptation of Jane Eyre at 20th Century Fox starring Joan Fontaine and Welles as Edward Rochester; it opened February 1944. (Half a century later two versions surfaced: in 1993 Fox Records paired the original soundtrack with David Raksin’s score for Laura—Herrmann had declined that assignment—and in 1995 the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra of Bratislava under Adriano issued a new recording on Marco Polo Records.) The project did not, however, mark a permanent return; Herrmann had already begun an opera adaptation of Wuthering Heights. In November 1943 he was named chief conductor of the CBS Symphony. On December 16 he led the New York Philharmonic in the premiere of his orchestral work For the Fallen, a war-themed piece commissioned by the League of Composers.
Over the ensuing years he remained largely at CBS or engaged with the opera, accepting only occasional film assignments: Hangover Square (January 1945); Anna and the King of Siam (June 1946; his third Academy Award nomination); The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (May 1947); and the love theme for Portrait of Jennie (December 1948). (In 1975 the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Elmer Bernstein recorded The Ghost and Mrs. Muir for Bernstein’s Film Music Collection label; Varèse Sarabande issued the original soundtrack in 1997.) One notable radio achievement was the May 8, 1945, V-E Day broadcast On a Note of Triumph, carried on all three networks and released on disc by Columbia Records. In July 1948 he divorced Lucille Fletcher; he married her cousin, Kathy Lucille Anderson, in August 1949. That marriage endured 15 years before ending in divorce in 1964. On November 27, 1967, he married British journalist Norma Shepherd.
A pivotal year arrived in 1951. Herrmann finally completed Wuthering Heights after eight years; no production occurred in his lifetime, although in 1966 he arranged with Pye Records for a recording largely at his own expense. The opera received its world premiere from the Portland Opera Company in November 1982. Also in 1951 CBS, responding to television’s ascendancy and radio’s decline, disbanded the CBS Symphony, leaving him unemployed. He relocated to California and, after more than a decade of occasional film work, adopted screen scoring as his primary occupation. For the next ten years he maintained the two-or-three-films-per-year pace typical of leading Hollywood composers. Even before departing New York he had composed the score for Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground, although its December 1951 release followed his next assignment, the science-fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (September 1951), notable for innovative theremin use. (Fox Records released an original-soundtrack album in 1993; On Dangerous Ground appeared a decade later on Film Score Monthly.) Shortly afterward, in February 1952, came the spy thriller Five Fingers, yet Herrmann’s major project that year was the adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” released September and among 1952’s highest-grossing films. Working steadily, he had three releases in 1953: White Witch Doctor (summer), followed by December openings Beneath the 12-Mile Reef and King of the Khyber Rifles. (Film Score Monthly issued a soundtrack for Beneath the 12-Mile Reef in 2001.) Two further films appeared in summer 1954: the Western Garden of Evil and The Egyptian, a lavish historical drama for which 20th Century Fox music head Alfred Newman enlisted Herrmann to share duties because of length and schedule. The Egyptian became the first Herrmann score issued on a contemporaneous soundtrack album, released by Decca Records. He next composed for a CBS television adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol broadcast Christmas Eve.
Three additional scores reached theaters in 1955, beginning with January’s Prince of Players. (In 1998 the Moscow Symphony Orchestra under William T. Stromberg released an album pairing music from Garden of Evil with a suite from Prince of Players on Marco Polo Records.) Summer brought the Western The Kentuckian. (In 1977 the National Philharmonic Orchestra under Fred Steiner recorded the score for Entr’acte Records.) The year’s most consequential film for Herrmann opened in October: The Trouble with Harry, the first of seven scores for Alfred Hitchcock. (In 1998 the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Joel McNeely recorded the score for Varèse Sarabande.) On December 23, 1955, CBS televised Herrmann’s second consecutive Christmas project, A Child Is Born, based on a Stephen Vincent Benét story, with an MCA Records soundtrack album.
Two new films appeared in spring 1956, similarly titled: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (April) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (May). The latter marked another Hitchcock collaboration in which Herrmann appeared onscreen conducting the London Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall during the climax. That year he also served as guest conductor for the Houston Symphony and, in a final radio effort, scored and conducted an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for the Columbia Workshop. A third Hitchcock film, The Wrong Man, opened in early 1957; summer brought the drama A Hatful of Rain. Three scores followed in 1958: the celebrated Vertigo (May), his fourth Hitchcock film, accompanied by a Mercury Records soundtrack album (re-recorded in 1995 by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Joel McNeely for Varèse Sarabande); summer’s The Naked and the Dead, adapted from Norman Mailer’s World War II novel; and late-year The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, inaugurating his work on Ray Harryhausen’s fantasy films, with Herrmann conducting the Colpix Records soundtrack album. Another three scores appeared in 1959: summer’s Blue Denim and the Hitchcock project North by Northwest (a 1980 recording by the London Studio Orchestra under Laurie Johnson appeared on Starlog Records; Rhino issued the composer-conducted soundtrack in 1996), followed by December’s Harryhausen film Journey to the Center of the Earth (Varèse Sarabande released the Herrmann-conducted album in 1997). Throughout the 1950s CBS frequently reused his radio music on television, and he supplied new themes and scores for series including Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel. On October 2, 1959, CBS premiered the anthology series The Twilight Zone, for which he composed several episode scores later issued on Varèse Sarabande albums in the 1980s.
Two 1960 scores continued his ongoing partnerships: June’s Psycho, the pinnacle of his Hitchcock collaboration and, with its strings-only instrumentation, among his most memorable works (Herrmann conducted a 1975 National Philharmonic recording for Unicorn Records; the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Joel McNeely recorded it for Varèse Sarabande in 1996), and December’s The Three Worlds of Gulliver, another Harryhausen fantasy, with a Colpix soundtrack LP in 1961 (a new Royal Scottish National Orchestra recording under Jay McNeely appeared on Varèse Sarabande in 2001). A full year elapsed before his next release, the Harryhausen film Mysterious Island. Film assignments diminished in the early 1960s as producers favored pop-oriented scores with potential hit songs, a direction Herrmann declined to pursue, yet he continued working. January 1962 brought Tender Is the Night, adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald (20th Century Fox Records issued the composer-conducted soundtrack). Spring’s Cape Fear, directed by J. Lee Thompson, offered another Hitchcock-style thriller (Elmer Bernstein adapted the score for Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake, released by MCA). After scoring episodes of the television Western The Virginian, Herrmann returned to Hitchcock for The Birds. When the film opened in spring 1963 his credit read “sound construction,” as the horror picture lacked a conventional musical score. That season also saw his final Harryhausen collaboration, Jason and the Argonauts (a 1999 Sinfonia of London recording under Bruce Broughton appeared on Intrada Records). In 1963 he became more involved with scoring The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. His next film, the final successful Hitchcock collaboration Marnie, opened June 1964, his sole screen score that year.
Following the dissolution of his second marriage and a reduction in film work, Herrmann, a lifelong Anglophile, began dividing each year between an apartment in London and California. His only 1965 film was Joy in the Morning. (Forty years later Film Score Monthly released a CD of the original soundtrack.) He composed a score for Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, but the director, pressured by producers toward a pop soundtrack, rejected it. (The unused score, widely regarded as superior to John Addison’s replacement, was recorded by the Royal Philharmonic for Elmer Bernstein’s Film Music Collection in 1977 and by the National Philharmonic under Jay McNeely for Varèse Sarabande in 1998; the Oscar-nominated 1992 documentary Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann matched portions of the music to film scenes.) The rupture with Hitchcock further signaled Herrmann’s diminished standing in Hollywood, yet he retained international esteem, and for the next five years all scoring assignments originated in Europe. The first was Fahrenheit 451, François Truffaut’s adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel, released fall 1966. Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, opening in the U.S. in spring 1968, also employed a Herrmann score. Meanwhile, in London he recorded his own repertoire for several labels. The opera Wuthering Heights appeared on Pye, along with Moby Dick and an LP pairing suites from his first two films: Citizen Kane material titled “Welles Raises Kane” and All That Money Can Buy cues under the alternate title “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” These 1967 recordings featured the London Philharmonic. In 1968 he contracted with Decca’s London Records subsidiary for a series of “Phase 4” stereo albums of his film music beginning with The Great Movie Thrillers, again with the London Philharmonic. Subsequent releases through the mid-1970s included Great Tone Poems (interpretations of works by Liszt and Sibelius), Gustav Holst’s The Planets, Great Film Classics, The Impressionists, Great British Film Scores (volumes one and two), Great Shakespearean Films, The Mysterious Film World of Bernard Herrmann, and The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann, most performed by the National Philharmonic. He also recorded Joachim Raff’s Lenore Symphony for Unicorn.
The Bride Wore Black was not Herrmann’s only 1968 score. He followed with the British production Twisted Nerve, serving as music director (Polydor released the soundtrack). He also wrote his sole television-movie score, for Companions in Nightmare, and composed his only musical comedy, The King of Schnorrers, produced at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut in 1970. Largely inactive as a film composer in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he accepted an assignment for the English-language version of the international co-production The Battle of Neretva, released at varying times in different territories (Entr’acte issued the composer-conducted soundtrack in 1975). Two 1971 films followed: The Night Digger and Endless Night. That year he formalized his residence, relinquishing his California house and settling permanently in London. With limited film work he devoted greater attention to classical recordings in 1971 and 1972, including The Four Faces of Jazz (Kurt Weill, George Gershwin, Milhaud, and Stravinsky) for Decca with the London Festival Recording Ensemble and Charles Ives’s Second Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra. (In 1974 he recorded his own symphony, its first hearing since 1942.)
Herrmann’s steadfast commitment to innovation in film scoring began yielding results in the early 1970s as a new generation of filmmakers, admiring his Hitchcock-era work, sought his services. Director Brian De Palma commissioned his first American score since 1965 for the Hitchcock-influenced Sisters, released March 1973 (the composer-conducted soundtrack appeared on Entr’acte). Another young director, Larry Cohen, engaged him for the 1974 horror film It’s Alive! (Portions reappeared in the sequels It Lives Again and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive.) De Palma then hired him again for Obsession, another Hitchcock-styled thriller shot in 1975. Meanwhile Herrmann continued recording his compositions and others for Unicorn, including A Musical Garland of the Seasons and, in his final independent session on October 2, 1975, his version of the Psycho score. Yet another young director, Martin Scorsese, commissioned the score for Taxi Driver; on December 20, 1975, Herrmann flew to Los Angeles to record it. Sessions took place December 22 and 23; afterward he returned to his
