About this Piece

“We are born with only one fear, the fear of falling,” writes the nameless narrator of Edmund White’s 1978 novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, to a lover who has abandoned him. “And that primeval anxiety now held me as I plummeted farther and farther away from your indifferent hands.”

White wasn’t just waxing poetically when he linked our fear of falling with feelings of longing and desire. Rather, his words mirrored the mid-century clinical definition of vertigo, which described the dizzying condition as both a manifestation of our hardwired fear of falling and a profound desire to experience that dangerous plunge.

The interlacing of fear and desire had also captured the imagination of Romantic artists of the 19th century. Across the literary and performing arts, the Romantics spun gripping tales exploring the mix of love and longing, beauty and obsession inherent in the human condition—a mantle gladly inherited by British director Alfred Hitchcock, who employed such themes as the bedrock of his films.

But the realm of Gothic romance Hitchcock conjured in his body of work isn’t driven solely by the director’s subject matter or his distinct visual aesthetics. Music also plays a pivotal role in establishing the macabre tone of Hitchcock’s films—especially in his string of postwar thrillers, from 1956’s The Man Who Knew Too Much to the early 1960s’ Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie, all of which boast a spine-tingling orchestral score by Bernard Herrmann.

The New York City-born composer believed in film’s power to create musical experiences that matched the emotional immediacy of a symphony or opera. And 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.

United by a shared quest to investigate the dark recesses of the mind, the pair unleashed their shadowy poetic vision across eight films. Hitchcock crafted the plot, dialogue, and visuals while Herrmann’s hyper-expressive music established the atmosphere and the characters’ psychological depths—those unseen elements of a film that haunt us long after the credits roll. (Or, as Herrmann shared in an interview after falling out with the director: “[Hitchcock] only finishes a picture 60 percent. I have to finish it for him.”)

For many, this director-composer relationship reached its artistic apex in Vertigo, a tale of obsession, anxiety, and desire based on the French crime novel D’entre les Morts (From Among the Dead), by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. The film traces the steps of Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), a retired San Francisco detective hired by Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to follow his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who he claims is suicidally possessed by her great-grandmother Carlotta. Scottie and Madeleine fall in love, but the detective later discovers—after believing he’d witnessed Madeleine’s death—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—short, recurring musical themes that represent specific characters or emotions.

Take the opening credits, where Herrmann’s score and the legendary designer Saul Bass’ swirling, acid-colored spirals commence our initial descent into a vortex of fear. A pair of relentless, winding figurations—known as the “vertigo” theme—simultaneously rise and fall in the strings and harp, imitating the breathless dizziness the condition causes as grisly chords erupt in the orchestral depths like jump scares. The music’s anxiety soon gives way to the first statement of Vertigo’s “love” theme in the horn section’s warm, bronzed baritone. Together these themes of fear and love establish the film’s primary focus: Scottie’s obsessive desire to fall in love with Madeleine/Judy—and his paralyzing fear to do so.

Herrmann’s leitmotifs also take on various guises throughout the film, their intensity ebbing and flowing as the plot progresses. Early on, when Scottie trails the woman he thinks is Madeleine across San Francisco—from her Nob Hill apartment to a flower shop and the Mission Dolores cemetery—the two end up at an art gallery in the Legion of Honor, where a harp quietly plucks a habanera rhythm (dumm dah-dah-dah) as Madeleine gazes at a portrait of her Spanish great-grandmother. But later in the film, as the detective’s subconscious pieces together Gavin and Judy’s crime during a nightmarish dream sequence, the habanera theme is hammered by the full orchestra, complete with clacking castanets. The thunderous drumming ratchets Scottie’s anxiety—and our own—as his obsessive visions of Madeleine/Judy culminate in his falling into an abyss of white below.

And in the pivotal Scène d’amour, when Scottie completes his Pygmalion-like transformation of Judy into Madeleine, Herrmann emphasizes the doomed nature of the detective’s desire by employing the sensual harmonies and orchestration of Wagner’s opera. The “love” theme heard in the opening credits returns—first in the ethereal sound of muted violins, then slowly building to a fevered climax for full orchestra that embodies the duality of fear and desire, anxiety and ecstasy at the heart of the film.

With the volcanic passion of the Scène d’amour’s sonic backdrop, Herrmann redirects Scottie away from his fear of the vertical—the fall that pulls him farther away from the object of his desire—and onto the horizontal plane of love’s tranquil waters, where the lovers experience a moment of sublime pleasure. In doing so, he mirrors Wagner’s own description of the musical momentum that drives his Tristan and Isolde:

one long succession of linked phrases to let that insatiable longing swell forth…through hopes and fears, laments and desires, bliss and torment…to find the breach that will open out to the infinitely craving heart the path into the sea of love’s endless delight.

—Michael Cirigliano II