HITCHCOCK AND HERRMANN

The inside story of one of cinema’s most prolific director-composer collaborations.

Theirs was an unlikely union. Alfred Hitchcock “was a Catholic from London who loathed conflict,” whereas composer Bernard Herrmann “was a volatile Jew from New York’s East Side,” a man who was known to shout at musicians, “Hey you! Play what’s written,” yet whose “mastery at conveying character psychology in music found its ideal vessel in film scores.” In this appreciative biography, music scholar Smith chronicles their decade-long professional partnership, from The Trouble With Harry (1955) to Marnie (1964). The goal of this book, Smith writes, is to show “Hitchcock’s filmmaking process from beginning to end” and “eavesdrop on discussions between director and composer, as they discuss a film’s flaws that music may help.” Their work together began when Hitchcock, needing a composer who could match Harry’s “offbeat blend of macabre humor, lyrical imagery, and romance,” was introduced to Herrmann, the temperamental, twice-divorced Juilliard grad who learned “how to depict psychology in music” from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. The results were legendary, with Herrmann’s music deftly accentuating the tension in Hitchcock’s films, from his use of atonality and “low-string harmonics” to match the off-kilter sensations of Vertigo, to the Fandango dance theme he invented for North by Northwest, to the discordant, all-strings score of Psycho. Smith borrows liberally from previous books, yet those unfamiliar with Hitchcock and Herrmann will learn much, such as that Hitchcock originally wanted no music over Psycho’s famous shower scene. He changed his mind, and Herrmann created perhaps the most famous music in cinema history, “three E-flat notes, in the first violins’ highest register” that are then “joined by shrieking second violins, playing E-natural,” with the notes “played with hard downbow strikes and leaping glissandos,” a simple solution that proved terrifyingly effective.

A well-researched portrait of a fruitful creative alliance.