How Bernard Herrmann made the film music that Igor Stravinsky never wrote
A column by Roeland Hazendonk
Igor Stravinsky (src: George Grantham Bain Collection / Wiki Commons)
It almost happened three times, but in the end there was no film for which Igor Stravinsky composed the music. However, given his ideas about what music could express – nothing but purely musical content – it is more remarkable that Stravinsky even considered composing for film than that nothing ever came of it. Stravinsky had emigrated to Los Angeles in 1939, and Hollywood movie executives were eager to work with him. They undoubtedly knew his reputation as a composer of legendary cinematic ballet music.
Film music, according to Stravinsky, was something completely different from visual – cinematic – music. He liked film music wallpaper; a background without an artistic right to exist. Both De Vuurvogel (1910) and Le Sacre du Printemps (The Spring Sacrifice, 1913) are narrative ballets, but the story is only minimally mentioned in the choreography – which is by definition wordless. Stravinsky composed the music before the choreography was created and he never intended to illustrate what happened to the characters or what they felt.
The fact that Stravinsky did not want to express a story or the emotions of the characters does not mean that his music cannot deeply speak to the imagination and can evoke intense emotions. At the premiere of Le Sacre, the audience became so emotional that fights broke out between supporters and opponents of the rough primal forces and the enchanting colors of Stravinsky's rousing score. The music went wonderfully with Vaslav Nijinsky's equally uncompromising choreography depicting a Russian rural ritual close to nature in which a young woman is danced to death as a sacrifice for a fruitful spring. Not Stravinsky's music, but Nijinsky's choreography portrays that story; while in film, the music conforms to the image, Nijinsky tuned his movements to the structure and character of Stravinsky's music.
If things had worked out, Stravinsky would have established a different relationship between image and music than was customary in his day. In 1942 he was asked to make music for Commandos Strike at Dawn, an anti-Nazi propaganda film in which a Norwegian fisherman resists the atrocities of the German occupier. Going against what was customary, Stravinsky started composing before the film – as if he was working on a ballet. He further avoided the clichés that characterized and continues to characterize such a film; no brass bands and percussion, but music based on Norwegian folk songs.
Nobody knows what the end product could have been, but ideas for the film music ended up in the Four Norwegian Moods suite. Things didn't go well between Stravinsky and the producers, and the project fell through. Two subsequent projects, including one with Orson Welles, also failed. Welles replaced him with Bernard Herrmann, who became responsible for the best film scores of the fifties and sixties as purveyor to Alfred Hitchcock.
The raw screeching violins that Herrmann conceived in the shower murder that made Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) legendary are purely illustrative; but also related to the refined stylized, quasi primitive wild rhythms of Stravinsky's Sacre. Herrmann’s style highly resembles Stravinsky’s in the scene featuring Marion Crane in a doomsday car ride, thinking she is leaving an unsucessful life behind when in fact she's driving towards a death that will hit her in the shower in the motel where her psychopathic killer awaits.
As she rides through the night, a deboned rhythmic string section can be heard that bears no direct relationship to what you see, but does reflect the character's restlessness and the measured nature of fate that she cannot escape. The most beautiful is the romantic lyrical melody line, illuminating the scene like a tragic rainbow that appears and disappears as the landscape slides by. Marion Crane is uplifted for a brief moment, but slips back into what is inevitable.
Herrmann, who was a friend of Stravinsky, wrote in this scene the kind of film music Stravinsky would no doubt have made had he dedicated himself to the genre with conviction. Not a wallpaper at all, but music that enhances the image independently and magnificently; music that has no meaning, but paradoxically ominously reflects the psychology of the character and anticipates her fatal dramatic development.
Roeland Hazendonk
Music journalist
Roeland Hazendonk is a music journalist. He has been reviewing classical music concerts for over thirty years for Het Parool and, before that, De Telegraaf. He also worked as a music programmer for, among others, the Holland Festival and the Festival in de Branding. He directed/presented dozens of documentaries about music for the public broadcasters and worked for many years as a presenter/compiler for Radio 4.