Citizen Kane

Of his film career Orson Welles famously said that he started at the top and worked his way down. Although Bernard Herrmann's professional trajectory was not quite so bathetic (he ended on the double-whammy of Obsession and Taxi Driver), some of the projects he worked on in his later years were little more than exploitation movies. The reputation of his first film score was to cast a long shadow over his career. When William Friedkin approached him to compose music for The Exorcist, he said to Herrmann, "I want you to give me a better score than you wrote for Citizen Kane." Herrmann - a volatile man at the best of times - shot back, "Well, why didn't ya make a better PICTURE than Citizen Kane?"

A better picture than Citizen Kane is a tall order. Despite its hagiographic status (this movie isn't just loved, it's revered), despite the acres of film criticism that have been devoted to an analysis of its every frame, despite the legends that surround its production and its near destruction, despite the seventy years of constant projection on cinema screens, TV screens and, now iPad screens, Citizen Kane remains an astounding work.

Herrmann had worked with Welles in New York writing, arranging and conducting music for the Mercury Theatre's radio plays (including the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast), and so, when the director moved his company out to Hollywood in 1939, it was only natural that the composer should follow them. The music that he wrote for Citizen Kane was by Hollywood standards as unconventional  as Welles's storytelling. The practitioners of film scoring at the time - composers like Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold - were ex-pat Europeans who swathed their movies in lush romantic themes that quickly became an industry template. Just listen to Korngold's score for The Adventures of Robin Hood or Steiner's Gone With the Wind (1938 and 1939 respectively) to get an idea of what the Hollywood film sounded like when Herrmann arrived in Los Angeles.


Herrmann outlined his approach in a piece he wrote for The New York Times on 25th May 1941: "The movies frequently overlook opportunities for musical cues which last only a few seconds - that is, from five to fifteen seconds at the most - the reason being that the eye usually covers the transition. On the other hand, in radio drama, every scene must be bridged by some sort of sound device, so that even five seconds of music becomes a vital instrument in telling the ear that the scene is shifting. I felt that in [Citizen Kane], where the photographic contrasts were often so sharp and sudden, a brief cue - even two or three chords - might heighten the effect immeasurably."

Of the thirty seven cues that appear on the Varese Sarabande CD (VSD-5806) twenty one of them run for less than a minute, and the shortest ("Thanks") clocks in at a mere eight seconds. The music is an eclectic mix of background score and source music that includes galops, polkas, waltzes, opera and jazz, making it - in the composer's own words - "like a jigsaw". The brooding theme that accompanies the opening montage of a decayed Xanadu and a dying Kane could come from a horror film. It is the sound of decay and corruption and is achieved through an orchestration of low wind instruments that would become one of Herrmann's trademark sounds. The stand-out piece of the score, however, is the four minute aria Herrmann composed for the fictitious opera Salaambo. This was composed before the film was shot and Welles blocked and filmed the scene to the music.

As a listening experience the full soundtrack of Citizen Kane is by necessity something of a disjointed affair. If you're not a completist - someone who needs to hear every note of every cue - then the score is best experienced in a suite conducted by Charles Gerhardt for the RCA disc The Classic Film Scores of Bernard Herrmann. This 1974 recording includes a stunning interpretation of the Salaambo aria by Kiri Te Kanawa, and the whole piece manages to encapsulate the shifting tones of the movie in just under fourteen minutes.

Herrmann reworked themes from the film into a concert piece called Welles Raises Kane, but, as the composer admits, they are "freely developed and not used in the manner employed in the [film]". I'm listening to this piece as I write this. It's available on Bernard Herrmann Welles Raises Kane / The Devil & Daniel Webster / Obsession on the Unicorn Kanchana label (UKCD 2065).