Episode Details

In late December 1975, Bernard Herrmann conducted the final notes of his smoky jazz score for Taxi Driver, returned to his hotel, and died in his sleep. This episode explores the turbulent life and explosive temper of the New York-born composer who revolutionized film scoring, championed the strangest instruments he could find, and detonated his most lucrative partnerships rather than compromise a single note.

We follow Herrmann from reading Berlioz's treatise on instrumentation at 13 to running the CBS Symphony Orchestra as an acoustic laboratory, then into Hollywood alongside Orson Welles for Citizen Kane and The Devil and Daniel Webster, which won him his only Academy Award. We break down the all-string black-and-white sound of Psycho, the shower scene cue Hitchcock never asked for, the nine harps of Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef, the theremins of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the 1966 confrontation over Torn Curtain that ended the Hitchcock partnership for good.

• How live radio drama taught Herrmann to manipulate emotion in five-second musical bridges
• Recording humming telephone wires at 4 a.m. and splicing them onto optical film tracks in 1941
• Why he fought to remove his name from The Magnificent Ambersons
• His retreat to television and Harryhausen fantasy films before New Hollywood directors brought him back
• The influence he left on John Williams, Danny Elfman, and George Martin's arrangement of Eleanor Rigby