Kirby,
This is most interesting. Thanks for sending. A description of Bernard as
prickly could not be more apt. When Orson Welles came to Hollywood to do his
first film, Citizen Kane, RKO wanted someone experienced and famous to write
the music score and suggested several composers. Welles would have none of
it. He insisted on bringing Herrmann with him.
Bernard Herrmann asked what the top fee was that any composer had yet
received. Max Steiner had reportedly received as much as $10,000 for an
original score, so that is what Bernard Herrmann demanded and received for
his first film score. He already believed and said he was better than anyone
else, even though he had yet to score a major motion picture.
That didn't exactly endear him to the other Hollywood composers who were
working their way up the food chain and he didn't have good relationships
with very many of them.
When working on his last film, Taxi Driver, Hermann even berated Steven
Spielberg. Spielberg who was a close friend of Scorsese, worked with Marcia
Lucas as an uncredited editor on the film. Steven was around the
post-production meetings and came to some of the recording sessions. He was
repeatedly effusive in his praise for Herrmann and finally Bernard had
enough. "If you know that I'm so damn good, why don't you ever hire me?"
While none of the films are mentioned in the article, Bernard's exile from
Hollywood, (which was really somewhat self-imposed as he loved conducting
orchestra concerts and there were more opportunities for that in London)
meant that he wrote scores for what were seen as B-pictures, but in
retrospect were Ray Harryhausen's classics, including Jason and the
Argonauts,7th Voyage of Sinbad and Mysterious Island.
Thanks again Kirby
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kirby McDaniel" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2011 7:09 AM
Subject: [MOPO] HERMANN CENTENARY
From Today's Wall Street Journal. Enjoy. Kirby McDaniel
www.movieart.net
• MUSIC
• JUNE 29, 2011
'Psycho' Maestro at 100
By JIM FUSILLI
Bernard Herrmann may be best known for his memorable contributions to
classic films, including his rousing overture to "North by Northwest," the
shower scene in "Psycho," the romantic themes of "Vertigo," the eerie
electronic music in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and the desolate blues
of "Taxi Driver." He might have preferred to be celebrated for his opera
"Wuthering Heights," symphonies and cantatas such as "Moby Dick," and
other concert works. According to the film composer John Williams,
Herrmann's greatest ambition was to be recognized as a conductor.
Nevertheless, Herrmann's lasting legacy remains his work in the
entertainment industry: the music for 48 feature films; for television
shows such as "The Twilight Zone" (his music for the episode "Walking
Distance" is one of his most poignant works); and for countless radio
dramas, including Orson Welles's "The Mercury Theater on the Air."
Thus Herrmann became America's greatest film composer not on the basis of
a few extraordinary pieces, but for an unsurpassed and complex body of
work in the service of story. No other composer so consistently enriched
the audience's understanding of a character's emotional and psychological
state.
"That was his great skill—his understanding of the psychology of
character," the film composer Howard Shore said.
Wednesday marks Herrmann's centenary, an occasion for countless
celebrations of his music and legacy. (See www.bernardherrmann.org.) Born
in New York to Russian immigrants in 1911, he proved a musical prodigy,
playing violin and piano at DeWitt Clinton High School and demonstrating a
facility for composition. Later, he embraced the music of Claude Debussy
and the English composers Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams. He also
admired the U.S. experimentalist Charles Ives.
"He was really a traditionalist," Mr. Williams said. "He was suspicious of
modernity. But he was also an advocate for neglected composers."
As a composer for hire, Herrmann's unflagging belief in his own opinions
about music served him as well as his supreme skill at composition and
orchestration. He once told William S. Paley, the president of CBS for
whom he worked for 15 years starting in 1933: "You're assuming the public
is as ignorant about music as you."
"He was not a collegial guy," said Mr. Williams, who worked with Herrmann
in Universal Studios' TV department. "He was contemptuous of a certain
kind of populism. He had his strong points of vision and had no truck for
people he felt didn't have integrity in their work. But with me he was
very kind."
In 1939, at Welles's insistence, RKO Studios hired Herrmann, who then
composed the score for "Citizen Kane." In it, Herrmann used two devices
that would become his signatures—employing leitmotifs to signal the
reappearance of a narrative thread and writing brief cues to bridge
scenes. Herrmann also introduced audiences to his affection for
ostinato—short, repeated phrases of a few notes—a device he would use
repeatedly throughout his career.
Herrmann was nominated for an Academy Award for "Kane" and "The Devil and
Daniel Webster," winning the award for the latter—his sole Oscar. With
those two works, he established himself as a visionary film composer—with
a formidable and prickly personality. In 1942, he demanded his name be
removed from the credits to Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons" after RKO
famously re-edited and butchered the film.
In 1955, Herrmann began his relationship with Alfred Hitchcock, scoring
"The Trouble with Harry," "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (in which he has a
cameo as a conductor in the climactic scene) and "The Wrong Man."
"Vertigo," released in 1958, contains more than an hour of Herrmann's
orchestral music, which consistently evokes yearning, tension and moral
disarray. With "North by Northwest" and "Psycho," his next Hitchcock
films, Herrmann crafted two of his most iconic scores, the former an
orchestral delight that balances comedy and suspense, the latter a sparse,
macabre work written exclusively for a string ensemble. In "Psycho,"
Hitchcock wanted no music for the memorable shower scene, but Herrmann
persisted; after hearing the screeching violins as Marion Crane (played by
Janet Leigh) is slashed and hacked to death, the director acquiesced.
In the mid-'60s, Hollywood's conception of what film music should be
changed. Producers wanted pop hits in the score: A hit soundtrack album
could serve as a promotional tool. When Hitchcock's "Marnie" disappointed
at the box office, Universal Studios executives told the director that one
reason was Herrmann's traditional score.
The shift in taste left Herrmann deeply embittered. "You couldn't spend an
evening with Benny without his spending half of it in a terrible diatribe
against one of the young musicians who'd gotten a job," actor-producer
John Houseman told Herrmann biographer Steven C. Smith in 1984.
Hitchcock hired Herrmann for 1966's "Torn Curtain," but stipulated that
the composer needed "to break away from the old-fashioned cued-in type of
music we have been using for so long." The composer agreed to Hitchcock's
demands, then wrote a score very much in the Herrmann tradition,
precipitating a bitter quarrel between the two men. Hitchcock dismissed
Herrmann, ending a 12-year collaboration.
To show what might have been, the "Torn Curtain" DVD includes among its
bonus materials several scenes with the Herrmann score in place. His
opening theme suggests a more robust cinematic experience will unfold and
his underscoring gives the film a gravitas it lacks with John Addison's
lighter, more contemporary touch.
Though Herrmann wrote a mischievous score for François Truffaut's
futuristic "Fahrenheit 451" that same year, he was no longer in demand.
"Benny was so unappreciated here," Mr. Williams said from Hollywood. "He
couldn't find work."
But in the early '70s, Herrmann enjoyed a rebirth. A new generation of
filmmakers understood how Herrmann had enriched the films he scored. Brian
DePalma hired Herrmann to write the music for his "Sisters," released in
1973. In one crucial murder scene, Herrmann uses shrieking horns, strings
and synthesizers and reintroduces a glockenspiel he'd deployed earlier in
the film as a symbol of childhood innocence.
Though ill with a heart ailment, Herrmann agreed to score Martin
Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," using muted trumpets and snare drums to
reinforce the sense of a dangerous mind careening toward violence. When
asked to compose a jazz love theme for a scene between a pimp and an
underage prostitute, Herrmann turned to composer and orchestrator
Christopher Palmer for help. Mr. Palmer quoted Herrmann's own 1968 musical
"The King of Schnorrers" for the haunting piece for saxophone and jazz
trio.
On Dec. 24, 1975, Herrmann died in his sleep at the Sheraton Universal,
which is perched above the studio's back lot where the Bates's home in
"Psycho" stands. He was 64 years old.
With the release of "Taxi Driver," which Mr. Scorsese dedicated to
Herrmann, the composer's reputation was fully restored. He was nominated
for an Oscar for both "Taxi Driver" and "Obsession"—Mr. De Palma's
"Vertigo"-like film—but he didn't win.
"Benny was what you'd expect him to be," Mr. Williams said. "Powerful and
willful. He put his idiosyncratic spin on everything he did. His lasting
contribution is not only his film music, but as a single-minded artist who
kept his seriousness intact. His music, yes. Everybody knows the Alfred
Hitchcock scores. What's behind that is a strong character that is
unyielding. He was a unique man."
Mr. Fusilli is the Journal's rock and pop music critic. Email him at
[email protected] or follow him on Twitter:@wsjrock.
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