Bernard Herrmann was born on June 29, 1911. Herrmann's career as a film composer began with Citizen Kane and ended with Taxi Driver. In between, he composed scores for about fifty movies and had important working relationships with directors Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, and producer/animator Ray Harryhausen.
Herrmann's career began as a conductor for CBS Radio. In 1943, after a decade at CBS, he was appointed Chief Conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra. His broadcasts with the orchestra were praised for their unusual programming, and Herrmann directed the broadcast premieres of many contemporary pieces. He was an early advocate of Charles Ives, whose music was not yet widely known, and championed the music of the German Romantic composer Joachim Raff.
During his time at CBS, Herrmann began working with Orson Welles. He wrote and arranged the music for many of Welles' Mercury Theatre radio programs, and conducted the orchestra during Welles' famous radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. When Welles began making movies, he hired Herrmann as his composer. Herrmann wrote the scores for Welles' first two films, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. The studio cut about an hour from The Magnificent Ambersons before releasing the film, which meant cutting almost half of Herrmann's score; he was so angry that he demanded that his name be removed from the film.
Throughout his career, Herrmann demanded creative control before he would agree to work with a director. Most directors, he believed, had no real understanding of music, or of its importance to a film, and he didn't want his artistic choices to be dictated by people who didn't know what they were talking about.
Herrmann said that one of the reasons his relationship with Alfred Hitchcock was so successful was because Hitchcock didn't interfere with his musical decisions. There were even moments when Hitchcock would shorten or lengthen a scene to accommodate Herrmann's music. Herrmann scored seven Hitchcock films, several of them among the director's very best – Vertigo, North by Northwest, and the classic strings-only score for Psycho. He also served as "sound consultant" on The Birds, which had a "score" made up of electronically altered bird sounds. The relationship between Herrmann and Hitchcock ended badly, when Hitchcock rejected Herrmann's score for Torn Curtain, asking for something in a more contemporary pop style.
Herrmann's unused score can be heard here, and pieces of it also appear in the 1991 remake of Cape Fear. Herrmann had scored the original version of the movie, and Elmer Bernstein adapted that score for the remake. The remake was longer, which meant Bernstein needed some extra music, which he took mostly from the unused Torn Curtain score.
The third major collaborator in Herrmann's career was animator Ray Harryhausen, who produced a series of fantasy movies in the 1950s and 1960s that were noted for what was, at the time, groundbreaking stop-motion animation. Herrmann scored four of Harryhausen's films – The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Three Worlds of Gulliver, Mysterious Island, and Jason and the Argonauts.
Herrmann's film scoring was not limited to the traditional orchestra. He believed that each project should use whatever combination of instruments would best suit that movie. A Herrmann score might be built around nine harps or a dozen flutes. He occasionally used a medieval wind instrument called the serpent, and his score for The Day the Earth Stood Still was one of the first to feature the theremin, an electronic instrument invented in the 1920s.
Among Herrmann's other important scores are The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Fahrenheit 451, and Taxi Driver, which was the last score he wrote before his death in 1975.
Herrmann also wrote music for the concert hall, including an opera based on Wuthering Heights, a symphony, and Souvenirs de Voyage for string quartet and clarinet. Steven C. Smith's biography A Heart at Fire's Center is a comprehensive look at Herrmann's life and music.