The Egyptian

The music score to The Egyptian is credited to two composers: Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann. Although it's true that Herrmann shared credit with other composers on movies that required songs - most famously Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, who provided "Que Sera Sera" for The Man Who Knew Too Much - and was credited as "a sound consultant" alongside Oskar Sala and Remi Gassmann for the non-musical sountrack for The Birds, The Egyptian remains the only true collaboration of his film scoring career.

The decision to use two composers on one film was a pragmatic rather than an artistic one. Studio head Darryl Zanuck was personally invested in the production and wanted his head of music Alfred Newman to do the score. Though he was keen to do it, Newman's other commitments would not allow him to commit fully to the project, and so Herrmann was brought on board. The two men did not actually sit down in a room and write music together (in fact, they consulted only twice during the scoring process), but carved the film up and worked independently. Newman scored the mystical sequences ("Valley of the Kings, "Death of Akhnaton") and drew on his reserves of ethereal string writing that had served him well on religious-themed pictures such as The Song of Bernadette and The Robe. Unsurprisingly, Herrmann opted to score the darker elements of the film ("Violence", "The Holy War", "Dance Macabre") and added a chorus to the orchestra to give it an element of spiritual mystery.

Despite the circumstances of its production, the score emerged as a coherent and genuinely affecting piece of music. Herrmann was not an easy man to work with, and it's testament to his relationship with Newman that this project went so smoothly. Those familiar with the work of both composers will have no trouble identifying who wrote what (more than half of the score was composed by Herrmann). For the uninitiated the Marco Polo re-recording by Morgan and Stromberg (8.225078) helpfully provides an asterisk against the tracks written by Alfred Newman.

The film itself turned out to be a disaster - mostly due to bad decisions by producer Zanuck - but the album of the soundtrack was a hit.