The Ghost and Mrs Muir

Herrmann used to refer to The Ghost and Mrs Muir as his "Max Steiner score". In saying this he was probably thinking of his extensive use of leitmotivs, associating particular characters with particular melodies and developing them with variations through a movie. This approach was - and still is - standard operating procedure for the film composer: think of James Bond, Indiana Jones or Darth Vader and a theme comes immediately to mind. Max Steiner, who started his Hollywood career a decade before Herrmann, was instrumental in creating the concept of the Hollywood film score and set the bar very high with King Kong (1933).

In truth, Herrmann had already written a score that lent heavily on the leitmotiv in Jane Eyre. The music for that film, however, had enough growling brass and unsettling woodwinds to mark it out as "a Herrmann score". The Ghost and Mrs Muir - the story  of a relationship between a young English widow called Lucy Muir and the spirit of a sea captain - is an altogether more tender affair, and it brought out in the composer a romantic sense of longing. True, there are some cues with a hint of menace - I'm listening to one right now called, perhaps appropriately, "The In-Laws" - and some that are tinged with an eerie quality, but the overall tone of the score is wistfully romantic. Even the titles of the cues ("Farewell", "Sorrow", "The Empty Room", "The Passing Years") convey a mood of loss and longing. Of them all, the most beautiful cue is "Andante Cantabile". In the movie this piece underscores Lucy's reminiscences of the captain and is an example of how effectively Herrmann could write under dialogue. The composer also writes a dramatic rising motif for the sea and employs a lyrical melody that he will rework in a later maritime score Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef.

I'm playing the Varese Sarabande disc (VSD-5850), which is from the original soundtrack. The score was also recorded by Elmer Bernstein in 1985, but I've not heard it. For my money, the Joel McNeely version of the "Andante Cantabile" - the single cue from the film that appears on the Farenheit 451 compilation disc (VSD-5551) - is the most achingly beautiful three minutes and thirty three seconds of Herrmann in my entire collection.