Marnie: A Suite in Two Movements

Editor's 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).

Marnie was the last of Alfred Hitchcock’s films Herrmann saw through to completion. Because The Birds required no conventional incidental music, there was a four-year lull between Psycho and Herrmann’s next project with Hitchcock. There were important changes in that time which doomed the composer’s working relationship with Hitchcock. Psycho was the last film Hitchcock made under his co-production agreement with Paramount Pictures. He then decided to move his production activities from there to Universal Studios, where his highly successful television show was produced. There he was one of the star directors working with the notorious Lew Wasserman, who ran Universal Studios in dictatorial fashion. The arrangement proved constraining in a variety of ways; Wasserman had distinct ideas about what a successful “Hitchcock Pictures” was, and tended to pressure Hitchcock about the choices he made in developing new projects. One object of derision was Herrmann, who – despite the spectacular success of his score for Psycho – Wasserman’s administration regarded as old-fashioned. Hitchcock insisted that Herrmann score his new film Marnie. Though Marnie had a mixed reception with the public, Herrmann garnered praise for his score’s contribution to the film.

Herrmann assembled this Suite himself four years after Marnie was finished, as part of a commercial recording for Decca Records called Music from the Great Movie Thrillers. Its plan is simple, and unfolds in two parts. The first part features the music of the credit sequence, which presents the two major ideas in the score: first, the agitated gestures associated with Marnie’s phobic reactions to the color red; the second, the lyrical theme associated with Marnie (Tippi Hedron) herself. Music from a scene early in the film is added to this as a sort of coda, which develops fragments of Marnie’s theme before closing with a complete statement of it in a less urgent mood. The second part features the music of the famed fox hunt sequence, where hunting-horn gestures in triple time are played off against Marnie’s theme, which asserts itself more and more urgently as she flees in terror from the hunt’s gory climax. The abrupt end of the hunt, where Marnie’s beloved horse Forio is mortally wounded, is followed by the agitated gestures that accompany her cathartic recollection of the event that provoked her mental illness: it gives way to a placid treatment of her theme which refers to the hopeful end of the film, where Marnie leaves with Mark (Sean Connery), prepared to construct her life anew.

— Christopher Husted

Movements
1. Prelude — Marnie
2. The Hunt — Blood — Coda