Educated at Juilliard, Bernard Herrmann seemed to be hurtling towards a straightforward classical music career. A colleague of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, he composed and conducted for CBS Radio from 1934 to 1940. He wrote many compositions, including two cantatas, a symphony, other orchestral and chamber works, and even a cycle for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. In 1941, however, he composed the score for Citizen Kane, and he went on to write music for sixty films. One of his most famous director collaborations was with Alfred Hitchcock, for whom he wrote eight scores.

While Herrmann’s music for Psycho is perhaps most famous, the music for the 1958 film Vertigo is equally praised for heightening Hitchcock’s compelling plot. After an incident in which a policeman’s partner has fallen to his death, Scottie suffers from vertigo (fear of heights) and must retire from the force. A man hires Scottie to follow his wife, Madeline, and the two fall in love, but his vertigo keeps him from saving her when she climbs to the top of a tower. When Scottie meets Judy, who closely resembles his lost love, he does the next logical thing—he tries to make her over in her image. Herrmann’s music portrays the drama every step of the way, from the menacing chord of the opening credits to the references to another ill-fated love, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, to the nightmare sequence after Madeline’s death, to the eerie love scene that completes Judy’s transformation into Madeline.