Bernard Herrmann Collectors Guide

by Brent Reid
Brent Reid
Post Views: 58
  • Talented but mercurial composer who created many iconic movie scores
  • Golden age of Hollywood great whose works also graced concert halls and radio
  • Joined Alfred Hitchcock for one of the most acclaimed artistic partnerships in cinema
  • His classically-influenced style fell from favour in 1960s but by 1970s was back in vogue
  • Sadly died in the immediate wake of several late-career successes but his music lives on

Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.

Bernard Herrmann painting by Gary Kester, 2020

Acrylic painting by Gary Kester, 2020; watercolour

Bernard Herrmann [Benny to his friends] was born on June 29, 1911, in New York City to an upper-middle class Jewish family. At a young age, he discovered a passion for music and pursued it aggressively and omnivorously. In his late teens, he found the music of Charles Ives and became involved in Aaron Copland’s Young Composer’s group.

After a half-hearted attempt at university training, he left school and became a staff arranger and conductor at CBS under the great Johnny Green (MGM’s soon-to-be musical director in the ’40s and ’50s). Both his composing and conducting abilities distinguished him, and within 3 years he was regularly conducting the CBS symphony and composing incidental music for the network’s most prestigious radio dramas. This brought him into contact with Orson Welles, who took Herrmann with him to Hollywood in 1939. Together they made Citizen Kane, which permanently fixed Herrmann’s reputation as a composer of music for films.

Though Welles proved unsuccessful in installing himself as a Hollywood director, Herrmann attracted many offers. Because he was still active at CBS in New York, he could afford to choose his film assignments carefully. He established a firm relationship with 20th Century Fox due to his friendship with Alfred Newman, the studio’s music director. His primary goal was to establish himself as a conductor, since he considered conducting his first love. When commercial radio declined in the late ’40s, Herrmann’s career shifted toward film music—a shift that bitterly disappointed him. He gave up writing concert music after the completion of his opera based on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and focused on composing music for film and television.

Arte: The Best of Herrmann | tribute

Herrmann had a busy year composing for film and television in 1959: after North by Northwest, Hitchcock’s only film for MGM, Herrmann moved on to score Blue Denim for 20th Century Fox in May and June; then to several episodes from the opening season of The Twilight Zone in July and August; and finally to Journey to the Center of the Earth at Fox from September through December. But times were soon to change for him. Alfred Newman retired as head of the Fox music department in 1959. The new administration did not favor Herrmann at all, and he would score only one more film for Fox after Newman’s retirement—Tender is the Night. It marked the end of the most consistent source of film assignments in his career. But his association with Hitchcock’s operation was at its height; several important films lay ahead—notably, Psycho which was ready for scoring in the winter of 1960. With Hitchcock’s move to Universal Pictures in 1962, Herrmann began to actively work in television. This, too, would come to an end, but not until 1966, when a falling out over the score of Torn Curtain terminated Herrmann’s relationship with Hitchcock.

Though Herrmann still attracted conducting offers, particularly from England, they diminished gradually until, by the mid-’60s, they stopped altogether. His film career began to fail as well when popular music began to supplant more conventional symphonic incidental music in films. By this time, he had written enough film and television music to live on the royalties they generated, so he went into semi-retirement and moved to London. His conducting interests found an outlet in commercial recordings at this time, and he established a productive relationship with several record companies, notably London, Decca, and Unicorn.

Still, Herrmann’s work with Welles and Hitchcock began to fascinate young filmmakers, who sought him out for their own films. This led to rewarding work in the early ’70s with Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese. Just as he was about to make a triumphant return to Hollywood, he died of congestive heart failure in Las Angeles on Christmas Eve 1975. He had just completed recording his score for Scorsese’s Taxi Driver [literally hours before, then met Steven Spielberg]. – Christopher Husted, North by Northwest CD (1995)

The above is an excerpt from a 1970 audio interview, released on a 1,000 limited edition CD as Conversation Piece: An Unvarnished Chat with BH (78:57). It’s also included as an extra with the Twilight Time BD of François Truffaut’s Hitch homage (source), 1968’s The Bride Wore Black. Herrmann’s strings for Psycho directly inspired The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and he later tutored Paul McCartney in film scoring for the latter’s work on domestic drama The Family Way (1966).

In June 1972, just prior to the release of Sidney Gilliat’s Endless Night featuring his latest score, Herrmann appeared onstage in London at the National Film Theatre for “The John Player Lecture with Bernard Herrmann” (52:29; transcript/part 2). It’s been released on the UK Indicator BD as an alternate audio track over said film. Incidentally, the score was created from Hitch’s brief for his long-attempted but ultimately never-realised Mary Rose project, and in 2019/2020 was re-recorded and released on a superb CD by Quartet Records.

Trailer/open matte, teaser | clips | theme song | MIDI | review | Film Score Rundown/videos/review, #2

Though Herrmann’s a regular fixture in general film music documentaries, amazingly, there are just a few so far solely dedicated to his life and work. The 28-minute, September 1976 episode of long running arts programme Camera Three was dedicated to Herrmann and broadcast just a few months after his death. It’s unavailable but there is a complete transcript.

Switching media again, the Bernard Herrmann: A Celebration of His Life and Music (1988, 150min) radio documentary is the most extensive, non-print overview to date, and has a companion piece in Ben-Hur: The Epic Film Scores of Miklós Rózsa. Both are also sadly unavailable but for now we do have a series of background articles and more. A feature-length documentary, The Lives of Bernard Herrmann, was announced in 2015 but despite showing much promise, nothing’s been heard since. His only substantial documentary to date, Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann (1992, 58:00), saw release in just two countries.

IMDb | clipping

Herrmann’s third and last wife was Norma Shepherd, a journalist and lifelong friend of Esther Rantzen, who gets many fascinating mentions throughout the TV presenter’s immensely readable memoir.

Esther: The Autobiography (2001)

A 2015 episode of the BBC’s Sound of Cinema series featured historian Matthew Sweet presenting performances of the Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Timothy Brock. It was titled, appropriately enough, The Sound of Hitchcock and included his and Herrmann’s big three. Four years later, Sweet presented Hitch and Herrmann which focused squarely on the pair’s relationship. Sweet returned to the Hitchcock well a third time in 2024 with another Sound of Cinema episode, this time featuring studio re-recordings.

Then there are the print biographies; again, surprisingly few but by several substantial non-English entries and any number of scholarly online essays.

A feature-length documentary, The Lives of Bernard Herrmann, was announced in 2015 but hasn’t transpired as yet and the website has died, though its social media remains active. Eventually we got Beyond Psycho: The Musical Genius of BH (2021, 61m, review), one of a series of 6 on American classical music.

2019 Herrmann Legacy Collection Interviews

Then just like buses… another comes along. Music for Murder: Hitchcock/Herrmann, and the Scores That Changed Hollywood is co-produced by Herrmann expert Steven C. Smith, author of the composer’s definitive biography, and a new book on his partnership with Hitchcock. The latter serves as a curtain-raiser to the doc, and Smith has already done lots of publicity and interviews for both.

add to all 7 film music sections:

The famed director-composer pairing commenced with The Trouble with Harry, and on through The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man remake; Herrmann was also credited as sound consultant on The Birds and scored 19 episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents/Hour. Their partnership was dramatised for the stage in 2021’s Hitchcock & Herrmann, before being adapted a second time (again like buses) in BBC Radio 4’s Benny & Hitch (2022), with Toby Jones reprising his role from The Girl and Tim McInnerny as Herrmann. It was recorded live at the Alexandra Palace Theatre, with BBC Concert Orchestra performances of music from Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, Marnie and Torn Curtain.

Herrmann also gets an affectionate précis of his life in “Bernard Herrmann: Hitchcock’s Maestro” (14:43), a section of the four-part documentary “Partners in Crime: Hitchcock’s Collaborators” (2008, 54:52). Also profiling Saul Bass, Edith Head and Alma Reville, it’s included on the Special Edition 2-DVD sets and all HD discs of Vertigo, and here…

This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.

I started Brenton Film because I love film – quelle surprise! The silent era, 1930s and 1940s especially get my literary juices flowing, so you'll see a lot about those. For more, see the About page and read this before emailing.

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