About this Piece

The first half of the 20th century saw classical music embedded into nearly every corner of popular culture. Thanks to advancing technologies in radio, recordings, film, and television, access was no longer limited to those with the means to attend live concerts—anyone with a record player at home or a movie ticket in hand could experience everything from a solo piano to a large symphony orchestra in crystal-clear sound. 

With this rapid-fire proliferation of recorded music came questions of artistic merit. Could orchestral scores written as the backdrop for a film, for example, match the quality of works penned for the solemn sanctuary of the concert hall? Many composers insisted on drawing a line in the sand: “Highbrow” art music stood on one side, and “lowbrow” commercial music on the other. Not Bernard Herrmann. 

The New York City-born composer embraced these new mediums, believing them to be valid avenues for creating musical experiences that matched the emotional immediacy of a symphony or opera. While he never considered himself a “film composer,” but rather a composer who worked in film, Herrmann’s greatest successes blossomed under the bright lights of Hollywood—a celebrated career of film scoring that began in 1941 with Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and ended 35 years later with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. But no director let Herrmann flex his musical muscles like Alfred Hitchcock. 

Similar to the Romantic artists of the 19th century, Hitchcock and Herrmann were fascinated with the mix of beauty and longing, violence and death inherent in the human condition. In a shared quest to probe the dark recesses of the mind, the pair unleashed their shadowy poetic vision over eight films: Hitchcock crafted the plot, dialogue, and visuals while Herrmann’s hyper-expressive scores established the atmosphere and the psychology behind the characters—those unseen elements of a film that haunt us long after the credits roll.  

For many, this director-composer relationship reached its apex in Vertigo, a tale of anxiety, obsession, and desire based on the novel D’Entre les morts (From Among the Dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. The film traces the steps of Scottie Ferguson, a retired San Francisco detective hired by a friend, Gavin Elster, to follow Gavin’s wife, Madeleine, who he claims is suicidally possessed by her Spanish great-grandmother Carlotta. Scottie and Madeleine fall in love, but the detective later discovers that the object of his infatuation is, in fact, a woman named Judy pretending to be Madeleine after Gavin murdered his wife.  

If that plot sounds particularly operatic, there’s good reason: The source novel was a modern twist on the medieval myth of Tristan and Isolde, which had also inspired Richard Wagner’s staged saga of love and death. And like Wagner, Herrmann burrows the audience deep into each character’s psyche by using leitmotifs—recurring musical snippets linked to specific characters or emotions—three of which form the foundation of the Suite from Vertigo that Herrmann compiled after the film’s release. 

“Prelude” opens with the film’s “vertigo” motif: a pair of relentlessly winding figurations that imitate the breathless dizziness the condition causes, simultaneously rising and falling in the strings and harp as macabre chords erupt in the brass like jump scares. “The Nightmare” accompanies a dream sequence Scottie experiences after believing he witnessed Madeleine’s fatal fall from a bell tower, driven by the sound of castanets and drums hammering a habanera rhythm (dumm dah-dah-dah) that evokes Carlotta’s Spanish heritage. Anxiety permeates every moment as Scottie’s obsessive visions of Madeleine culminate in his falling from the same bell tower as his beloved. 

And in “Scène d’amour,” Herrmann emphasizes the doomed nature of Scottie and Madeleine’s love by employing the sensual harmonies and lush orchestration of Wagner’s opera. The music slowly raises the temperature of a pivotal scene between the pair, moving from the ethereal sound of muted violins to an all-encompassing climax that embodies the duality of fear and desire, anxiety and ecstasy at the heart of the film.  

This scene, more than any other moment in Herrmann’s score, mirrors Wagner’s own description of the musical momentum that drives his Tristan and Isolde: “one long succession of linked phrases to let an insatiable longing swell forth...to find the breach that will show the infinitely craving heart the path into the sea of love’s endless delight.” — Michael Cirigliano II