Located in the UK
Located in the USA
Located in Europe
- Bernard Herrmann
North by Northwest: The Match Box (concert version) (1959)
- EMI Music Inc (World)
edited by Christopher Husted
- 0.0.4+bcl.0/0.0.0.0/perc/str; (18.16.14.10.8)
- 4 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. Given to a flair for the sinister, he is particularly apt in the numerous moments of lurking menace that give the film's drive a viceral intensity. The best of these moments must certainly be "The Match Box," which follows Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) through the most cunning of his many bits of survivalist improvisation.
The villain, Philip van Damme (James Mason), has mistaken Thornhill for the mysterious "George Kaplan," an American agent intent on disrupting van Damme's espionage ring. The CIA engineers a rouse to throw van Damme off Thornhill's trail — even though it means keeping the real "George Kaplan," the beautiful Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), in action…and in danger. Though initially cooperative, Thornhill leaps at the first opportunity to flee the arrangement, intent on liberating Kendall, with whom he is smitten. He creeps up to van Damme's country house, near the Mount Rushmore monument, and manages to overhear van Damme in conversation with one of his henchmen. Eve's status as an American agent is exposed, and van Damme — cooly outraged — decides to kill her on the private plane that is about to take them out of the country. Eve's plight is now desperate, and Roger has to rescue her.
"The Match Box" begins as Roger, seeing her in her room upstairs, scrambles up the house's flagstone walls to stop her before she leaves her bedroom. He misses her; stepping out on to the mezzanine above the living room to see Eve with her soon-to-be-killers. Puzzling over what to do, he pull his kerchief out of his pocket to blot the blood from his badly scraped hand — and gets one of his personallymonogrammed match books along with it. Remembering that Eve once remarked on the match book, he seizes on the opportunity to write a note inside it and throw it down to her. He misses the ashtray on the coffee table in front of her — and is nearly discovered when one of the henchmen sees it on the floor and throws it into the ashtray. Soon afterward Eve sees it, reads the note, and excuses herself to her bedroom to find out what Roger is doing there.
The accompaniment to the scene is ingenious and quaintly sinister in its evocation of Roger's desperation. Cast entirely in triple meter, "The Match Box" alternates between two musical ideas. The first features a dialogue between a solo vibraphone and bass figures presented either by the clarinets or by the 'cellos and basses. This dialogue unfolds over a ground of revolving chords scored for violins and violas. This idea alternates three times with a contrasting idea featuring the clarinets and bass clarinet. Their figure, made up of planed chords, glides over a quietly percussive beat — in the same rhythm as the ground figure of the previous idea — scored for 'cellos and basses. Interestingly enough, the three expressions of the second idea are vaguely symmetrical: the first and third expressions each have 10 chords in them. This sort of concern for form is one of Herrmann's favored means of articulating the drama of a scene. In this case, Herrmann manages to take what might have been merely a transitional moment in the drama and make it distinctly memorable for its style — which, in working with Hitchcock, is always a distinct possibility…
— Christopher Husted
Scores
Score