In 1951 Bernard Herrmann had just had his CBS radio contract terminated. He took up more or less fulltime residence in Hollywood. Radio was dead, a casualty of the voracious new kid on the block, television. Little could Herrmann know that the comfortable shores of California would no longer be safe haven from television's omnivorous maw by the time another decade could expire. But that is another decade of Herrmann's story, one that would begin with the composer writing scores for the small screen's Twilight Zone and end with him virtually exiled in Europe.

As the 1950's began, Herrmann was returning to Hollywood, where he could live in style supporting himself from the bountiful coffers of 20th Century Fox. And while so doing, he could also regularly commute back to New York, hopeful as he then was of arranging the performance of his first (and only) opera, Wuthering Heights. (Little did he then dream that the opera would still be unperformed at his death a quarter century later.) Herrmann was comfortable working with Fox's Music Director, Alfred Newman. In fact, from 1944 to 1955 - the year he finally found his cinema soulmate, Alfred Hitchcock - Herrmann scored only one film away from Fox, On Dangerous Ground for RKO and his old pal from CBS days, John Houseman. Working for Newman and Darryl Zanuck, the composer had a wide range of subjects from which to draw inspiration. And he had some collaborators he could respect -- an important consideration for this most perfectionist of professionals.

Two projects offered to him that first year back in California were very palatable indeed. First, Five Fingers, at first titled Operation Cicero, which Joseph Mankiewicz was making with James Mason. That director was at his peak, having won Oscars the past two years for (both writing and directing) A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. Mankiewicz had the acerbic wit and caustic outspokenness to excite the creative juices of Bernard Herrmann. And then the two had proved a good match before -- on one of Herrmann's most famous scores of the '40s, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

The second project, to follow immediately after in spring 1952, was the anticipated adaptation of Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, to star Gregory Peck, Fox's biggest box office star, as well as Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward. Whereas the cynicism of Mankiewicz reaches perhaps its apex (or is that nadir?) in Five Fingers, a screenplay which manages to avoid the Hollywood habit of including at least one sympathetic character, the theme of Kilimanjaro fit right in with one of Zanuck's preoccupations in the postwar years, man's search for meaning in a seemingly senseless universe. Fox had already had great success with this cosmic question: The Razor's Edge had been one of 1946's biggest successes, owing not a little to Alfred Newman's inspired score (nominated for the Oscar, ironically against Herrmann's Anna and the King of Siam. Both lost, to Friedhofer's Best Years of Our Lives.) Prince of Foxes (1949), while no blockbuster, had also developed Samuel Shellabarger's similar theme of cynicism redeemed by unconditional love -- again with Newman's transcendent help. Still to come was the ill-fated adaptation of Mika Waltari's The Egyptian, which attempted to make Pharaoh Akhnaten's fumblings after the true God saleable to self-satisfied, newly suburban America. It failed - but, in the once-in-an-age collaboration of Herrmann and Newman, generated one of the 1950's best scores.

There is no evidence that Herrmann was on a cosmic quest, however, when he wrote these two scores. Although he was self-aware regarding his mercenary status, the composer gave his best as always, and, also as usual, Zanuck and Newman were well rewarded for their confidence in their volatile employee. The two scores are a fascinating contrast: in its dark colouring and uneasy ambience, Five Fingers anticipates the great scores of the Hitchcock years (1955-66); Kilimanjaro, on the other hand, gains its poignance from that peculiarly human faculty, pleasure recalled in repose, or, in other circumstance, recalled in pain. As with several of Herrmann's most successful scores, say Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and Anna and the King of Siam, as well as, of course, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, the distance between aspiration and achievement, hope and fulfillment, heaven and earth - evokes a nostalgic sough, a bittersweet aftertaste which few of his later scores, save Vertigo and perhaps Marnie, would even attempt. And Vertigo, we immediately perceive, is perhaps the supreme Hollywood statement of the mundane version of the same theme, the awful gulf between fantasy and reality.

Whereas Five Fingers gains much from the nervous energy of fear and suspense (and here anticipates the Ray Harryhausen fantasies as well as Hitchcock), Kilimanjaro aches with the ardour of lost love. The title of its most famous excerpt, The Memory Waltz, says it all. That set piece and the Interlude are the only pieces from either film that have ever been recorded before. Herrmann himself conducted them for one of his Phase 4 spectaculars. We've applauded the Stromberg/Morgan team before for their arduous labour of reconstructing long lost scores, and seeing them through to the recording stage . ¹ We must say this time that Stromberg has faced down the Herrmann fanatics. The versions on this new recording give nothing away to the composer's own, even the original soundtrack performance, recorded with the magnificent Fox orchestra, with whom Herrmann must have consoled himself often while trying to get his own concert career going again. (Irony once more - how could he have known he would finally have to go to England to achieve that?) Indeed, if there was at the time any personal pain to parallel and inform the eloquent remembrances of Kilimanjaro, we might reflect on the gains for us in this rare glimpse into the composer's inner world. Perhaps, as he approached his forties, with no performance of his beloved opera in sight, no sure future as a concert conductor either, we can be forgiven for finding in Kilimanjaro, one of his most purely beautiful works, a longing both transfixing and forlorn. Longing of this intensity only receding hope can create.

¹. Another new reason to applaud the Marco Polo production team. They have begun inserting in the notes precise track timings for the entrance and duration of themes - an immense help for those of us into the technical side of film scoring.