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- Bernard Herrmann
North by Northwest: Overture (Decca records version) (1959)
- EMI Music Inc (World)
edited by Christopher Husted
- 2+pic.2+ca.3+2bcl.2+cbn/4.3.3.1/timp+5perc/2hp/str; (18.16.14.10.8)
- 3 min
Programme Note
Born in New York City in 1911, Bernard Herrmann began his career as a composer and conductor in the late 1920's. Early associations with Charles Ives, Percy Grainger, Philip James and Aaron Copland's Young Composers Group formed the cornerstones of his musical development. In 1934 he began a long association with CBS Radio. The experimental bent of CBS programming greatly encouraged his development as a musician. He excelled at incidental music for both poetry readings (La belle dame sans merci, A Shropshire Lad) and for radio dramas by Orson Welles (Mercury Theatre of the Air), Norman Corwin (Columbia Presents Corwin) and Irving Reis (Columbia Workshop).
Herrmann honed his conducting skills in many novel programs of his own devising for the CBS Symphony Orchestra, and served as its principal conductor from 1943-1950. Ready access to the Symphony — and the many world-class soloists who performed with it — elicited a steady stream of concert music from him, including his Nocturne and Scherzo (1936), a Symphony (1939-41), and a song cycle on Nicholas Breton's The Fantasticks (1941-43). His most ambitious works are a dramatic cantata on Melville's Moby Dick (1937-38), and an opera on Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1943-51).
Herrmann's association with Orson Welles led him to film scoring, beginning with Citizen Kane in 1941. He subsequently worked actively at 20th-Century Fox (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Day the Earth Stood Still) before his decade-long association with Hitchcock began in 1954 with The Trouble With Harry, later including The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. The influence of his work with Hitchcock and Welles led Herrmann to important work with François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451, The Bride Wore Black); Brian DePalma (Sisters, Obsession) and Martin Scorcese (Taxi Driver).
North by Northwest is rightly admired among Alfred Hitchcock’s late films for the masterful ease of its movement between suspense, surprise, mystery, humor, pathos and romance; Bernard Herrmann’s score is similarly admired for its deftness in aiding that movement and capturing those moods. The score is driven by an array of short themes — most of which are associated with distinctive instrumentations — which address the rapid shifts of the plot. Most prominent among them are the two thematic ideas that drive the "Overture," which is very conventional in form. The dominant rhythm is established immediately by the timpani, which alternates with neighbor figures; these alternations steadily accumulate more instruments with each iteration, moving from the orchestra’s lowest registers upward. Once much of the orchestra has been drawn into play, the principal theme — brief and spiraling in shape — is presented by the piccolo, flutes and violins. The introduction, just heard, was based on this theme, and its brevity gives rise to a continuing tide of variation. Soon afterward the subsidiary theme is expressed with a brightening emphasis from a xylophone. It too is compiled of a repeating figures, which are supported by an extended series of arpeggiated chords in the orchestra’s lower registers. The two themes undergo two further alternations — developing all along — before the principal theme asserts itself aggressively in a definitive and memorable development featuring a solo piccolo paying against the harps, which play in opposing glissandi. A sort of cadence is achieved with two chords, a tritone apart, which repeat emphatically. The tritone — long notorious as tonal music’s most unstable interval — serves as a sly comment on the hero’s perilous and seemingly insolvable predicament. The subsidiary theme is taken up by the full orchestra and stated with accumulating intensity before the long coda overtakes it. Based on the principal theme, the coda at first emphasizes the spinning quality of the theme’s first gesture, tossing it back and forth between the winds and strings. The volleys stop when solo piccolo and harps restate their memorable variant on the theme, and the tritone-related chords furiously stamp the movement to a flamboyant finish.
Though the overture serves memorably as accompaniment to Saul Bass’s credit sequence, it was originally written for the film’s first extended chase sequence, where a drunken Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) tries to flee his would-be killers at high speed through Long Island country roads in a Mercedes sports car. In a typical gesture for Herrmann, the Overture reappears — in a marvellously sinister adaption — in the film’s last extended chase sequence, across the President’s faces carved into the living rock at Mount Rushmore. In a droll touch, Herrmann, recalling the drunkenness of the first chase, titled the overture’s return at the end of the film "On the Rocks!"
The present version of this Overture is the one generally accepted for concert performance, and was created in the summer of 1968 for the first of a series of commercial recordings of Herrmann’s film music for London Decca. Called Music from the Great Movie Thrillers, the recording featured this "Overture" along with excerpts from several of his scores for Alfred Hitchcock’s feature films: The Trouble with Harry (1955), Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960). This is the last of three different versions of the "Overture." The first is that written for the film. The second is that created for a concert given at the Hollywood Bowl on 25 September 1963. Called Music from Hollywood, the concert marked the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Composer’s and Lyricist’s Guild of America. The concert featured the work of a dozen composers, each of whom selected two pieces from their film scores. Paired with the "Memory Waltz" from his score for The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), this second version represented Herrmann’s contribution to Hollywood film scoring. He conducted his offerings himself — the only opportunity he had to realize his long-standing desire to conduct at the Hollywood Bowl. Herrmann subtly revised the Overture for the concert, the most noticeable difference being a slightly more emphatic final chord.
Though the second version served as the Overture’s concert premiere, it was not performed again in Herrmann’s lifetime, and was effectively supplanted five years later by the third version created for Music for the Great Movie Thrillers. This version sports a much more elaborate ending which extended the music of the coda in the original version. Conforming handsomely to the expectations that greet a concert overture, this is the version that has become one of the most successful of the many selections from Herrmann’s film music that have made the transition from film to the concert hall.
— Christopher Husted
