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- Bernard Herrmann
North by Northwest: Conversation Piece (concert version) (1959)
- EMI Music Inc (World)
edited by Christopher Husted
- 3.1.4+bcl.0/0.0.0.0/str; (18.16.14.10.8)
- 5 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. Of course, there is a love theme — and a fine one at that! It is first heard when Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) finds himself guided by a porter to the table of Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) in the dining car of the 20th-Century Limited, bound for Chicago. They met briefly at Union Station in New York, while Thornhill desperately sought to elude the police who were about to capture him. She helped Thornhill without the slightest question, and walked away. Supposing he is incognito, he soon finds himself invited to lunch — and probably much more. After a brief statement of the theme at the moment their flirtation matures, they leave separately for her compartment…and the more extended expression of the love theme while they talk more intimately — and kiss very erotically. Ever on the lookout for a droll touch, Herrmann titled this music "Conversation Piece."
The whole movement is driven by a gentle, propulsive rhythmic figure which comments on the movement of the train. The scoring is dominated by the strings, with expressive solos for the oboe and clarinet; additional clarinets and flutes brighten the scoring of the harmonies. After extended presentations of the theme for oboe and for clarinet, the violins take up the theme, bringing it to a subtle conclusion. There follows a spiraling dialogue for oboe and clarinet over descending harmonies while the lovers revolve around one another in the tiny compartment; their intensifying ardor is conveyed in a more lush presentation of the theme for strings, leading to a deceptive cadence: the porter has arrived to clean the room!
In a more deeply droll comment, Herrmann deliberately suggests the "Liebestod" from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in the shape of the theme's first phrases: we will soon learn this is anything but a chance encounter, and eventually that it isn't entirely planned the way we suspect. But, for the time, it's Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint — and what could be more romantic than that?
— Christopher Husted
Scores
Score
