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  • Bernard Herrmann – Vertigo (Original Motion Picture Score)

    Bernard Herrmann – Vertigo (Original Motion Picture Score)

    Film Score  |  Film Released May 9th 1958 | Score Composed Between January and February 1958

    Bernard Herrmanns 4th film score as a collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock

    Mercury Golden Imports Series | 1977 | Netherlands

    Bought: Discogs | March 2026

    Vertigo is another film experience inseparable from its music. I don’t remember the exact first time I watched it, but I have a distinct memory of how the score made me feel. Watching Vertigo is like wading through a melancholic ocean of darkness and painful love. It’s a trance state. You don’t know what’s a dream and what’s real. The film is slow and strange, and the music meanders and weaves with it, spiraling, emoting, blooming in passages of real orchestral beauty. As a classical film score it stands up decades later without any qualification. Herrmann turned in something that belongs in a different category than most film music. It belongs in the same conversation as orchestra and concert halls.

    The Object

    Vertigo has always been a special film for me. It was one of the films that helped me fall in love with movies. I’ve also spent time near the Bay Area, and made it a point to visit with my wife some of the locations where it was filmed like Cypress Point and Mission San Juan Bautista. Standing in those places with the film in your head is a particular kind of experience. My appreciation for Vertigo is an appreciation for its art and its mood. I’m not drawn to any specific genre — not especially to noir — I’m drawn to what’s good and valued for what it is. A great score helps one hundred percent of the time, and this one helps considerably.

    My copy is a Mercury Golden Imports pressing from 1977, pressed in the Netherlands. I don’t have a similar pressing to compare it to directly, so I can only speak to what I have. It’s a characteristically European package — interesting fonts, an unusual label design, a gold strip across the top of the cover. The vinyl and the sleeve both have that thin, slightly flimsy quality typical of European pressings from this era. Very 1970s in every sense.

    The cover art draws inspiration from the film without using any images from it directly. A hand grasping from the darkness of an iris — a woman’s face transposed four times in a circle, the whole thing suggesting an eye, or a spiral, or both. Weird and alluring in a specifically 1970s way, the kind of image that would pull someone in at a record store whether they’d seen the film or not. By 1977 Vertigo was nearly twenty years old and had not yet been restored or widely reassessed — it was still in the vault. A large sticker on the front cover announces that it was imported from Europe, pressed in the Netherlands. I wish more European imports in American record stores were that straightforward about their origins. Many stores I visit today are quietly moving European pressings to American collectors without much acknowledgment of what they actually are.

    Before even playing the record, a genuine highlight: the back cover carries extensive liner notes by Jay Alan Quantrill. A full historical and critical write-up on the score, the film, the collaboration. That kind of documentation is exactly what the collector in me needs — context.

    Sound Quality

    The sound quality of this pressing leaves something to be desired. The vinyl is soft and the shelf life has taken its toll — there are pops throughout and some distorted passages that I suspect have more to do with the condition of the wax than with the producers’s intentions. Mercury claimed that most of the Golden Imports series were pressed on high-quality vinyl, and that may well be true, but they didn’t say much about how those pressings would age. What I have is what it is. The music survives.

    The Music

    Central to the theme of Vertigo is obsession, and central to the emotional language of Herrmann’s score is obsession. It manifests here as circling, spiraling, suspending sounds. This is music that builds and returns, builds and returns, never fully resolving, never letting you go. From the first cue through the last, the score provides immense emotional power to the scenes that demand it, and in the quieter scenes it functions as counterpoint giving you a subtle hint of what might be waiting around the next corner, or at the top of a staircase.

    Martin Scorsese, speaking of his favorite film, called the score tragically beautiful and absolutely essential to the spirit, the functioning, and the power of Vertigo. Critics have reached for words like symphony and propulsion when trying to describe how the music works inside the film.

    Herrmann was working deliberately in the tradition of the Romantic leitmotif — a technique associated most with Wagner, where specific characters, emotions, or ideas are assigned recurring musical themes that develop and transform over the course of the work. Kim Novak’s character carries her own motif, which Herrmann shapes and reshapes throughout the film to mirror what’s happening to Scottie’s perception of her. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde — an opera built around obsession, longing, and a love that cannot be consummated — was a direct influence on the Vertigo score, and if you know both works, you can hear it.

    Herrmann wrote the score in approximately 45 days, which seems impossible given how rich and fully developed the final result is. He described what Hitchcock wanted in two words: obsession and longing. Those two words contain the entire score. Herrmann dealt with both more personally and more deeply in this music than in any of his other work — he went headlong into the deep end and found something there that he had not quite found before.

    One practical complication: due to a musicians’ strike in America during the recording period, Herrmann was unable to conduct the score himself. The conducting fell to Muir Mathieson, which Herrmann resented deeply. He had always conducted his own work and considered it inseparable from composition. The sessions were recorded in Europe — not what he originally intended, and not something he ever fully made peace with. Given how personal this score was to him, that loss of control must have stung.

    The Cues

    Prelude (2:58)

    The opening cue, playing over the title sequence. Built around a relentless repeating figure called an ostinato — the same circular pattern cycling over and over, creating a dizzying effect that mirrors the film’s title and its central psychology. Herrmann uses the full orchestra here: strings, brass, woodwinds, harps, vibraphones, celeste, and a Hammond organ. The swirling figures in the strings and harps were designed to complement the hypnotic, spiraling visuals that Saul Bass created for the titles. The whole prelude is built around a single note — D — that keeps returning like an obsession that can’t be shaken. It ends not on a resolution but on that same unresolved D, as if the music itself cannot escape the loop. Herrmann described this kind of writing as creating a sense of going nowhere while moving constantly.

    A small aside: the note D appears in the low brass — in tuba form — at the precise moment the words ‘Directed by Alfred Hitchcock’ appear on screen. Who knows if that was Herrmann’s subtle editorial comment on the heavy-set director.

    Roof-Top (1:37)

    The film opens on a grey metallic bar across the screen. Scottie’s vertigo is introduced to the audience not through dialogue or explanation but through music — a rush of sensation that tells you exactly what the film’s title means before a word is spoken.

    The chase scene that opens the film is fast and aggressive, with the strings playing a dizzying circular figure — the same vertigo motif from the prelude, now at a sprint. The brass sustain long tones underneath while the strings race above them. When Scottie slips and hangs from the gutter in his first vertigo episode, the music abruptly stops its motion. The strings cease racing. The brass hold a massive, dissonant chord. Stillness where there was movement. It’s the musical equivalent of looking down.

    Madeleine (1:12) — The Restaurant

    Marked in the score lento amoroso — amorously slow. The first appearance of what will become the Madeleine theme, arriving at the precise moment her face enters the frame. All strings, all muted — con sordini — which produces a softer, silkier, slightly veiled tone. Herrmann uses this deliberately. The theme is built around rising and falling melodic phrases that feel like longing, like something beautiful just out of reach. No brass, no percussion, just muted strings and a single harp. The restraint makes it feel private, interior, as if we’re already inside Scottie’s head before he knows it himself.

    Carlotta’s Portrait (1:52)

    One of the score’s most quietly haunting cues. Built on the habanera rhythm — a Cuban dance rhythm, dotted and syncopated — which Herrmann associates throughout the score with Carlotta, with fate, with obsession. Here the vibraphone gently strikes a single note at regular intervals, like a clock ticking or a heartbeat. The melody passes between flutes, clarinets, and muted horns, each section taking its turn before handing it to the next. The effect is circular and inevitable and trance-like. Madeleine sits staring at the portrait. The music doesn’t dramatize the moment, it inhabits it.

    The Beach (3:26)

    Begins passionately — muted cellos playing an impassioned rising melody, the horns and strings joining in. This is Herrmann at his most romantically expressive, closer to the lush European Romantic tradition than his usual more economical style. As Madeleine talks about a long dark corridor, the strings quiet to a continuous sympathetic murmur — a flowing six-note figure repeated without pause, creating a hypnotic undertow beneath her words. When she talks about her gravestone, the trombones and tuba appear alone, playing spare half-note progressions — low, slow, heavy with everything they imply. The cue ends with the full orchestra at a passionate climax as Scottie and Madeleine embrace. It resolves to a bright major chord — the happiest the score gets.

    Farewell and The Tower

    The habanera tempo returns. The Madeleine theme returns with it — lush and full, confirming everything Scottie feels about her, the obsession made music one more time before the film takes it away.

    At the tower, the vertigo motifs from the prelude return and begin accumulating, the tension building bar by bar in a way that makes you desperate to know what’s coming. And then a scream and a fall, and Scottie’s confusion and despair are matched precisely by a score that equals both — music that has no resolution to offer because the scene has none either.

    The Nightmare and Dawn (2:22)

    Seductive and frightening in equal measure. The animated nightmare sequence begins with the Madeleine theme distorted and fragmented — the same notes, wrong — then shifts through several stages of increasing agitation. The habanera rhythm appears now beaten on timpani rather than plucked or bowed, growing louder bar by bar until the full orchestra erupts. Herrmann uses sul ponticello — bowing near the bridge of the instrument — to produce a harsh, metallic, thin string tone unlike anything else in the score. The flutes play flutter-tongue technique. At the climax, harps run wild glissandos in opposite directions simultaneously while the cymbals crash and the brass blare. Then the sequence ends and the orchestra simply stops.

    Scene d’Amour (4:58)

    One of the most bewitching pieces of music I know. In the film it’s matched with a wondrous transformation — Scottie caught up in a whirlwind of obsession, watching a woman who resembles Madeleine emerge from a bathroom as the woman he has lost. The theme fills the scene of her entry into the frame and it’s an emotional experience that the film could not achieve without it.

    This is the emotional and musical peak of the entire score. Herrmann begins with strings alone — the Madeleine theme in its fullest, most impassioned version. The music builds slowly, adding instruments gradually. Then Scottie waits alone while Judy is in the bathroom. The music shifts — strings playing sul tasto and sul ponticello alternately, an unstable and searching quality, the musical expression of a man holding his breath. When Judy emerges fully transformed, the music erupts: molto largamente e appassionato — broadly and passionately — the full string section in an unrestrained climax. It resolves at the end to C major, the clearest and most unambiguous chord in Western music. A moment of completion that is also, given everything we know by then, deeply tragic.

    The Necklace / The Return / Finale

    The habanera rhythm returns one final time when Judy puts on Carlotta’s necklace — the gesture that gives everything away. The brass blare it now. Not the subtle, muted versions from earlier in the film — the full brass, loud, inevitable. The return to the tower is built on a slow accumulation: violas, clarinets, bassoons, the timpani rolling underneath. Everything the score has been building toward arrives here, and then the finale follows, and then the film ends the only way it could.

    Closing

    The score is lush, vibrant, and genuinely beautiful. At times it gives the audience pain. At times it helps us remember things. We remember things not from the film, but from somewhere older in ourselves. It confuses us with wonder, keeps us guessing what’s real, and holds us in a sustained emotional state that very few pieces of music can maintain for two full hours. When I put this record on I’m pulled into the spiral. I’m Jimmy Stewart following Kim Novak around another corner in San Francisco, not knowing what I’ll find.

    Thanks for reading.

    RTR

  • Bernard Herrmann – Psycho (The Original Film Score)

    Bernard Herrmann – Psycho (The Original Film Score)

    Film Score  |  Film Released June 16th, 1960 in New York City

    Bernard Herrmanns 5th film score as a collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock

    Vinyl Passion | 2015 | Netherlands

    Bought: Siren Records, Seaside CA | Sometime in 2016

    The Object

    Film music has a mysterious appeal to me, and especially in horror and suspense. It’s the genre where the finest blend of sound and image happens — full immersion, no separation between what you see and what you feel. And the history of a film is sometimes subverted entirely by the history of its score. That’s what happened with Psycho.

    My first time watching it was probably in high school, early 2000s. I knew it carried a legacy even then, but I wasn’t fully aware yet of the cultural weight of the film or of what that soundtrack had done to modern consciousness. What I remember most distinctly is the staircase scene. The dread of it. That’s no small feat when the era I was growing up in was defined by slashers and gore fests going for full shock and awe. Psycho operates on a completely different frequency. It doesn’t shock you. It unsettles you. It did that to audiences in 1960, and it still does it today. That’s the mark of a real work of art.

    There’s something I’ve always loved about film soundtracks on vinyl. In some ways the film score has become society’s classical music — people are increasingly drawn to film and video game scores as a way to fill a room, to musically enhance a workspace, to just live inside a sound. There are soundtracks out there that function completely as standalone albums. The movie experience deepens with repeated listenings of the score away from the film. You start to hear things differently. The music stops being illustration and starts being its own object.

    Psycho is the horror film that started a lot of people’s relationship with the genre. Everyone has a scene they go back to when they recall their first time watching it. For me it’s the staircase. For most people it’s the shower. But for the full package of this film, there is no separating it from its score. The shrieking strings, the gleam of the knife blade, the staggering suspense of that shower scene — image and sound put together to create something neither could be alone. Bernard Herrmann’s uncanny instinct for sonic suggestion and his close working relationship with Hitchcock made it possible. Hitchcock famously said 33% of the effect of Psycho was due to the music. That feels like an understatement.

    My copy is a European import pressing, acquired sometime in 2016 — most likely from Siren Records in Seaside, California. The pressing itself does the score justice: good depth, strong highs, which this music demands. The cover is another story. It doesn’t capture the film at all — the scene depicted, the figure shown, looks like a poor recreation rather than anything from the actual movie. But it has the right ingredients on the packaging: the title in that jagged lettering, Alfred Hitchcock’s name, the bright red scene, the knife in a hand, the words Original 1960 Movie Score. That was enough to pull it off the shelf.

    Psycho is one of those films that stays with you long after you’ve watched it, and for me that staying power lives in this score. It’s gripping completely on its own, without the screen. You put this on in a room and something shifts. You visualize that something bad is happening, or has happened, or is about to. The music does that work without any images at all.

    “The Knife” has to be one of the most recognizable cues in film history — second only, maybe, to the two-note announcement of the shark from Jaws. Parodied and referenced below in the Simpsons, one of my favorite callbacks. We’re talking genuinely iconic sound imagery, burned into the cultural subconscious. But that cue is only about thirty seconds of this score. There’s an entire architecture around it that most people have never sat down and listened to. That’s what this record is for.

    The Music

    Bernard Herrmann was born in 1911 in New York City to German Jewish immigrant parents. He was the oldest of his siblings and grew up in a household steeped in arts and culture — the kind of environment that produces serious people. He developed an early fascination with classical composers and received his musical education at some of the finest schools in the city before landing at CBS Radio, where as a young man he was composing and conducting live orchestral broadcasts. It was there that he fell into a close working relationship with Orson Welles, scoring several of Welles’s radio productions before following him into film. Citizen Kane was his first score. The trajectory from there was steep and fast.

    It was his collaboration with Hitchcock, however, where Herrmann’s masterpieces were made. Psycho was Hitchcock’s fiftieth film and their fifth collaboration together. For it, Hitchcock initially wanted something light — a bit of jazz, unobtrusive, background texture. Herrmann had other ideas.

    The story of how this score came to be is almost as dramatic as the film itself. Hitchcock screened the first cut of Psycho and fell into a depression, convinced the film would fail. He considered shelving it entirely. Out of that uncertainty came a fateful creative decision — or rather, an absence of one: Hitchcock decided certain scenes, most notably the shower, should carry no music at all. Just the screams and the sound of the knife and the water.

    Herrmann disagreed. He went off on his own during a holiday break in Hitchcock’s schedule and scored the film his way — including the shower scene. When he played it back for the director, Hitchcock’s response was immediate. He kept everything.

    What made the execution possible was one audacious decision: strings only. No brass, no woodwinds, no percussion. A fifty-piece string orchestra and nothing else. The reasons why this worked go deeper than budget:

    Strings carry a dynamic range that other orchestral families can’t match — they can whisper and they can shriek, and they can move between those two states faster than the human nervous system can process. Herrmann used pizzicato (plucking), tremolando (rapid bow movement to create trembling), harmonics, and sul ponticello — playing near the bridge to produce a harsher, more abrasive sound. He also employed con sordini, mutes placed across the bridge, to create what one scholar called a dark, unexpected tone entirely appropriate for the film. And critically, the all-string palette complemented the black-and-white cinematography — Herrmann himself called it a “black and white sound.”

    But the deeper reason strings worked here is dissonance. The film is about mental disorder, a fractured psyche, the horror of what lives behind a normal face. Herrmann tracked that through the harmonic language of the score — cues that resolve on wrong notes, phrases that end without landing anywhere safe, chords that sound off because something is off. In the murder scenes the music is extreme and aggressive. In the quiet scenes it meanders with a grim foreknowledge of what’s on the screen. The tension is never released. You never get to exhale.

    Listening Notes — January 17, 2026

    Side One

    Prelude / The City / Marion and Sam / Temptation

    Very suspenseful from the first note — almost shocking in its immediacy. Ostinato and repetition, a driving cyclical motif that establishes from the opening seconds that something is wrong and will remain wrong. Then it shifts — love, temptation, racing thoughts. Almost sorrowful. Marion is deeply unhappy with her situation and the nervousness of the score mirrors the nervousness of the performance. Herrmann is already inside her head before we know anything about her.

    Flight / The Patrol Car / The Car Lot / The Package / The Rainstorm

    Paranoia. The feeling of being watched. Sombre and heavy with impending doom that builds without release. Cat and mouse — the flight from the police, the wrong turn, the rain. And then a psycho comes. We’re left with incredible tension, and you think the arrival at the hotel might provide some relief. It doesn’t. The music knows what’s coming and it won’t let you forget that.

    Hotel Room / The Window / The Parlour / The Madhouse / The Peephole

    Silent at first, then sharp strings cutting through. Very spooky atmosphere — eerie calmness, strings floating through the mist. Norman Bates is charming and unsettling in equal measure, and the score walks that line with precision. The surface noise on my copy shows up here, which in a strange way doesn’t hurt the atmosphere.

    Side Two

    The Bathroom / The Murder / The Body / The Office / The Curtains / The Water / The Car / The Swamp

    When it all comes to its inevitable, shocking peak. The string concerto. The shrieks. And then the sorrowful aftermath — sparse, sedate, minimal — the music doesn’t release you from the shock but gives you space, long drawn-out phrases, sharp isolated notes, your mind filling the silence with what you just witnessed. And then the swamp, the car sinking slowly down and down, and the musical phrases spiraling downward in the same direction. The whole universe of this film is going down together.

    The Search / The Shadow / Phone Booth / The Porch / The Stairs / The Knife

    A similar motif returns, but with more purpose behind it now. The stabs come back — but different this time. Something more sinister, more knowing. The difference between shock and realization. The first time you heard these sounds you didn’t know what was coming. Now you do. The music knows you know.

    The Search / The First Floor / Cabin 10 / Cabin 1

    Sustained, drawn-out notes that build and ebb. A flow through the remaining scenes, gathering weight rather than releasing it. The architecture of the score is doing structural work here — you’re moving toward something final.

    The Hill / The Bedroom / The Toys / The Cellar / Discovery / Finale

    Up and up we go. The plot is fully in command now, information arriving faster than the music can comment on it. And then it gets strange — a creeping quality before the finale, unsettling and odd in a way that’s almost surreal. The ending doesn’t resolve. It lands, but not somewhere comfortable.

    Closing

    This is a fine recreation of the score on vinyl. The pressing does right by the music — the highs land where they need to and the depth is there. The cover art is a different story, but you’re not buying this for the cover.

    Whether this score works as a standalone listen depends entirely on what you bring to it. For some it will be repetitive — and it is repetitive, deliberately and structurally so. But in that repetition there is emotion and a specific kind of beauty. You have to be a willing listener, someone patient with string arrangements and comfortable sitting inside a single mood for the length of a record. If you are, there’s real reward here.

    Herrmann believed that music was cinema. For the black-and-white bleakness of this film, he turned in an equally bleak and moody score — spare, unornamented, uncompromising. He and Hitchcock were working in the same register, building the same thing from different ends of the creative process. Black and white all the way through. In the end, the film and the score are inseparable. You can’t hear one without the other.

    Thanks for reading.

    RTR