He preferred to break with Hitchcock rather than adapt: Bernard Herrmann remains incomparable and unforgettable to this day.
Click to open the share function.
When Bernard Herrmann conducted, things could get loud – and not just musically. During the recording of “Taxi Driver” he encouraged the drummer so much that he promised him new drumsticks if the old ones broke. This outburst is more than an anecdote: it shows the uncompromising musician who has always despised the zeitgeist. “I don’t write pop music,” he once barked to Alfred Hitchcock – and remained true to himself.
From radio to cinema
Table of Contents
Bernard Herrmann, born in New York in 1911 as the son of Russian-Jewish emigrants, began his career in radio and from 1934 onwards shaped a clear orchestral sound as conductor and composer of the CBS Symphony Orchestra.
Here he does what he does best: the celebrated conductor Bernard Herrmann (around 1940).
BMI/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
In countless radio plays he experimented with timbres and used unusual combinations of instruments – for example in the experimental radio series “The Columbia Workshop” (1936), where theremin whimpers, harps and saxophones merged into new sound spaces.
Collaboration with Orson Welles
A crucial artistic partnership connected him with Orson Welles: their collaboration on “Citizen Kane” (1941) became legendary, because Herrmann gave the film an invisible dramaturgical structure with his radically modern score.
At a rehearsal of CBS Radio’s “The Mercury Theater on the Air” (1938): producer Orson Welles with his arms raised, Bernard Herrmann conducting the CBS orchestra in the background, Ray Collins at the microphone and Richard Wilson next to him.
public domain
“The task of music is to connect these individual parts into a whole,” he explained – and in doing so created a new understanding of film music that no longer just accompanied, but told.
The man at Hitchcock’s side
In the 1950s and 60s, Herrmann was one of the cinema’s defining sound architects. He wrote scores for Alfred Hitchcock that made film history: “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest” and “Psycho.” The screaming strings from the shower scene became the film musical epitome of horror – a sound that shaped horror films for decades.
Alfred Hitchcock looks skeptically over the shoulder of the exhausted Bernard Hermann on the set of “Vertigo” in the 1950s. However, the two exceptions did not break until 1966.
IMAGO / Everett
Herrmann never saw music as an accessory, but rather as the central force of a film: “Hitchcock completed his films 60 percent. I took care of the rest.” His tone was unmistakable – dark, seething and romantic to the core. In 1966 there was a break with “Torn Curtain”: Hitchcock wanted pleasing music, Herrmann refused. The collaboration was over.
Passion on the podium
Herrmann’s work as a conductor is less well known. In the 1960s he led renowned orchestras in London such as the Philharmonia and the London Symphony Orchestra. His programs included rarely performed works by Gustav Holst, Arthur Bliss and Charles Ives.
Bernard Hermann in the 1970s – a few years before his death on December 24, 1975 at the age of 64.
Public domain
He composed his own compositions such as the Moby Dick cantata or For the Fallen and shaped an uncompromising style: clear contours and uncompromising intensity right up to the threshold of pain. Musicians described him as demanding, brilliant – and feared because of his rough manners.
Music without compromise
Bernard Herrmann polarized. As a composer, he experimented with timbres, instrumentations and new technologies – from screaming strings to organ thunderstorms. Shortly before his death, he oversaw the recording of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”
One day after the last session, he died in his sleep at the age of 64. “You can stick this thing on my coffin, then I’ll always know what time it is,” he joked about a new digital clock – as if he had suspected that his music would stand the test of time.
Click to open the share function.
