A heart at Fire's Center [antikvár]

Preface to the 2002 Edition In the decade since this biography was first published in 1991, Bernard Herrmann has risen in status from a relative cult figure to be recognized as a major voice in twentieth-century music and cinema. Nearly all of his fifty film scores have been commercially issued, and even his less familiar music for radio, television, and the concert hall is finding new, appreciative audiences through recordings and live performance. Two major motion pictures—1991's remake of Cape Fear and 1998's remake of Psycho—have udlized his original film scores; and movie audiences were introduced to the composer himself in the 1992 documentary Bernard Herrmann: Music for the Movies, which received an Academy Award nomination. Many of today's top film composers, including Danny Elfman and Michael Kamen, credit Herrmann as a major influence; others pay a different kind of homage by stealing from him for everything from film scores to television commercials. Psycho is almost certainly the most copied score ever written; the sound of shrieking violins devised for the movie's shower murder scene is as famous around the world as a pop hit. The time seems right, then, to reissue this book in a paperback edition. When I began this project in November 1983, my sights were set lower than a full biography: as a journalism student at the University of Southern California, I hoped to compile an oral history from Herrmann's collaborators, as well as from the friends who warmly recalled a "Benny" Herrmann his co-workers did not know. Within months, however, I realized that the composer was too complex and rich a subject for such a reductive approach. f® %