Jane Eyre

Bernard Herrmann was a great Anglophile. He loved English furniture and English antiques, he loved English music and English literature, and toward the end of his life he fell in love with an Englishwoman and married her. He was particularly drawn to the books of the Bronte sisters (he would devote much of his non-film composing energies to writing and trying to stage his opera of Wuthering Heights), and so the opportunity to score a film adaptation of Jane Eyre could not be passed up. Orson Welles, who was signed to play the part of the brooding Mr Rochester in the Twentieth Cenury Fox production, recommended Herrmann to producer Darryl Zanuck, who had been trying unsuccessfully to get Igor Stravinsky to do the score. Herrmann also had a champion in Alfred Newman, a respected film composer himself and head of Fox's music department, and, despite serious doubts of his own ("There isn't a chance for me to do the score ..." he wrote to his first wife), he got the job. He would later enjoy a long and fruitful relationship with the studio under Newman's tolerant guidance, and the two men would collaborate on the score to The Egyptian in the 1950s.

The score - which is thundering out of my stereo right now - is a more conventional Hollywood piece, employing a full orchestra and a Wagerian use of leitmotivs (Herrmann, in fact, referred to it as his first "screen opera"). Paul Bowles - known primarily today as the author of The Sheltering Sky , but also an accomplished composer - praised the score for its "Gothic extravagances and poetic morbidities" in an article in the New York Herald Tribune. It's a phrase that - above any other written about him - captures the essence of Herrmann's music.

I am listening to a recording of the score conducted by Adriano on the Marco Polo label (Marco Polo 8.223535), a recording which horrified some purists by employing a synthesizer to create the sound of a music box. As I've said, I don't have the musical knowledge to pass judgement on these things. The music is dark and brooding and romantic, and the yearning love theme seems - to my untrained musical ears, at least - to be echoed in the John Williams score for the 1971 Jane Eyre remake.