Bernard Herrmann
          Jane Eyre

Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra/Adriano
Marco Polo 8.223535 Total time: 68:15

Summary for the Busy Executive: Love in the Old Dark House.

Unlike many Hollywood film composers of the time, Herrmann actually
trained as a composer and wrote concert pieces before working for the
movies.  People usually and quite rightly point to differences between
film music and concert music.  Having written successful concert music
doesn't guarantee a great film score, any more than writing a great
novel or a good stage play guarantees a good movie script.  Faulkner as
a screenwriter failed to come up to Dudley Nichols or Preston Sturges.
Indeed, most of the great Hollywood writers came from newspapers or the
pulps.  Most of the successful film composers began as theater organists
or conductors.  Korngold began in Hollywood as the exception, rather
than the rule.  Around the Forties, this all began to change.  Composers
the likes of Antheil, Moross, Copland, Eisler, Rozsa, Elmer Bernstein,
and David Raksin started to find well-paying work in California.

Concert music usually requires a long span in which to unfold its matter.
A film composer only rarely gets the luxury of space.  Most film "cues"
run a matter of seconds.  Furthermore, the music seldom asserts primary
position in a film. For one thing, it shouldn't overpower the dialogue,
and for another, it can't compete with the screen image.  It typically
hovers at the edge of conscious hearing, establishing a mood rather than
directing narrative.  These are some of the reasons why almost nobody
records film scores as the composer wrote them.  The hand of a judicious
editor almost always interposes between the Ur-text and the listener.
Otherwise, you would get mainly scraps, robbed of the images they
supported, not very interesting on their own.  Of course, there are
always exceptions.  Opening and end titles gave composers opportunity
to shine.  Indeed, I doubt whether anyone besides specialists remembers
any music out of Gone with the Wind other than the strong opening title.

Herrmann owes his film career to Orson Welles.  The composer hit a home
run with his very first Hollywood score, Citizen Kane - yet another
landmark that film set, on top of its photography, storytelling, and
scenery design.  One has to remember what most American film scores were
like to appreciate Herrmann's achievement.  Screen composers usually
approached their work in one of two ways: either a close fit of music
to gesture and dialogue (Max Steiner and Carl Stallings) or a kind of
constant Wagnerian undercurrent establishing general mood (Korngold and
early Waxman).  Herrmann, however, had made his living from the radio -
providing not only incidental music for radio plays, but "theme" music
and identifying "stings," the latter having to be both brief and memorable.
It carried over into his incidental music.  Working for the radio meant
working fast and to deadline, to boot.  Herrmann developed his distinctive
movie style from his work in radio.  He could write a symphonic movement
or the elaborate counterpoint of a symphony orchestra, but why, if a
back-and-forth between two chords could make as much or more of an effect?
Herrmann typically (that is, in the scores we tend to think of, like
Psycho) doesn't work with themes, but with memorable gestures.

Nevertheless, Herrmann worked in many different film genres, besides the
avant-garde Hitchcockian thriller: fantasy, Western, sci-fi, epic, film
noir, horror, and romance, among them.  In the Forties, Herrmann worked
on four romances, fairly close together: Jane Eyre (1944), Anna and the
King of Siam (1946), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), and Portrait of
Jennie (1948).  Herrmann provides a musical equivalent of the photography
- rich black and white, where even the shadows have shadows.  Herrmann
comes up with a score that makes you tense in anticipation before Jane
opens every new door at Thornfield.  In many ways, these four scores lie
closest to then-current Hollywood practice among Herrmann's output as
well as to the composer's symphony, in that we get not only the gestures,
but full-fledged themes.  Jane Eyre even incorporates a Wagnerian Leitmotiv
system. A "passion" theme shapes Mr. Rochester's theme.  Jane gets her
own theme, which goes through extensive transformations as new situations
arise in the film.  Romance looms bigger, more obsessive in Herrmann's
music even than in Bronte's book.  For me, who tends to giggle during
the mushy stuff, Herrmann's score is just about the only thing that keeps
me interested (that and marveling at how young Elizabeth Taylor looks
in the part of Helen).  Herrmann hides behind the mask of Post-Wagnerian,
all the while slipping in little nudges of Twentieth-Century harmony,
rhythm, and scoring.  In many ways, he pulls off a trick on the ear.

Herrmann liked to imagine himself as an 18th-century boulevardier and
wit, despite most biographical evidence to the contrary.  His psyche
inhabited the neighborhood of Romanticism, even Byronism, quite evident
in the subjects that attracted him (an opera on Wuthering Heights, a
cantata on Moby Dick, for example).  It also comes out in his attitude
toward drama in general.  Elmer Bernstein tells a story about Herrmann's
reaction to Richard Rodney Bennett's generally-admired score to Murder
on the Orient Express.  Bernstein raved especially about the sequence
when the train pulls out of the station to a majestic waltz.  Herrmann
hated it.  "That train," he intoned, "is a train of DEATH!!!" Well,
sometimes a train is just a train. But that sensibility is what made
Herrmann the ideal composer for Jane Eyre and Hangover Square.

As I've said, most film scores consist of scraps and shards.  As far as
I know, nobody records film scores as they left their composers' hands.
Even Herrmann himself (and sometimes, I believe, Christopher Palmer)
rearranged his scores for record.  The conductor Adriano (one-name only,
like Madonna) has done a bang-up job stitching things together from
musical yarn into sweaters and socks as well as some other editorial
ministrations.  Though not the equal of London orchestras in this
repertoire, the Slovak Radio Symphony does well enough, and the recorded
sound is beautiful besides.

Steve Schwartz