Biography
Bernard Herrmann was born in New York in 1911 and began composing when he was in his teens. While at high school Herrmann's talent was recognised and he was invited to take up music composition at New York University, before moving on to the Juilliard School of Music. He was given his first job as a conductor at the age of 20. By the age of 23, Herrmann was installed as a conductor and arranger for CBS – one of America's three national radio networks.
While there, he was introduced to Orson Welles who was directing the acclaimed Mercury Theatre on the Air series. They collaborated on the renowned 1938 broadcast of H G Wells's The War of the Worlds – an adaptation so convincing that thousands of listeners believed Martians really were attacking Earth and started to flee their homes.
In 1940 when Welles went to Hollywood to direct Citizen Kane (1941), he asked Herrmann to write the film's score, promising him full artistic freedom. In fact, many scenes in Citizen Kane were adapted to fit Herrmann's new style of rhythmic, earthy music. Welles later said that Herrmann's music greatly attributed to the success of the film.
Herrmann won an Oscar for his next film collaboration with his pioneering score for William Dieterle's Faustian folk fable The Devil and Daniel Webster. By 1951, forging ahead with more electronic music experiments, he produced the score for the Robert Wise sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. It was here that Herrmann introduced the theremin, an electronic instrument developed in Russia, that produces eerie bleeps and whoops when a hand is placed above it.
In 1955 Bernard Hermann became part of another famous partnership when he started working on The Trouble with Harry with Alfred Hitchcock. It marked the start of a brilliantly creative filmmaking collaboration, which went on to include film greats like Vertigo and Psycho. Despite Herrmann's enormous contribution to Hitchcock's films, in 1965, Hitchcock fired the notoriously difficult composer from the film Torn Curtain.
However, a new generation of filmmakers was keen to work with the pioneering composer and, in 1966, the French filmmaker François Truffaut chose him to compose '21st century' music for his sci-fi film Fahrenheit 451. Herrmann's final film score, for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), won him a posthumous Oscar nomination. He died just hours after recording it in 1975.
