"For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary;
for those who do not believe in God, no explanation is possible."
(Opening title card of The Song of Bernadette)

Shortly after Franz Werfel came to Hollywood in 1940, the massive first edition of the Kunitz/Haycraft Twentieth Century Authors appeared. Of Werfel, whose novel The Song of Bernadette had enjoyed sensational success in its English translation that same year (1942), Kunitz and Haycraft had this to say: "Werfel is the only modern writer who has done distinguished work in all three genres...", that is, poetry, drama and the novel. Werfel, a German-speaking Jew, had come to fame as a pacifist poet at the height of Germany's mad militarism, the middle of World War One. He had achieved even wider repute as a dramatist in Vienna productions of his plays Goat Song (1922) and Juarez and Maximilian (1925), the latter produced by the great Max Reinhardt. Werfel's pacifism was by now tempered with a religious fervour, which informed all of his later work. Before he finally turned to the novel with which Werfel had made theatrical history - a modern meditation on the Faust legend, Spiegelmensch (1921). Werfel had by now come to a more profound understanding of man's dual nature. The brotherhood-of-man optimism of his youth was giving way to a realisation of the radical evil within man.

The rise of Nazism would only confirm Werfel's pessimism about man's condition without a vision of the transcendent. In 1937 Max Reinhardt, already a refugee in America, staged Werfel's The Eternal Road in New York. Jaded Broadway could hardly understand, five years before Auschwitz, the relevance of this elaborate reduction of the Old Testament to the years ahead. In 1940, while rumours of his slaying by the Nazis reached the west, he enjoyed his greatest American success with the novel Embezzled Heaven. Werfel, who had never confessed a specific religious tradition, now seemed convinced of the imminence of disaster, but also of the immanence of God. He saw man's only way out in the acknowledgement of the latter.

The huge popular success of Werfel's biographical novel The Song of Bernadette in 1942 could perhaps be partly explained by its main theme - the victory of a soul over suffering. The peculiarly Roman Catholic emphasis of ascetic self-renunciation - Bernadette Soubirous, unsophisticated recipient of grace, gives all up to respond to a heavenly calling - touched an exposed nerve in millions of non-Catholics during the uncertain days of 1942. But that a Jew should be drawn to this tale of miracle and peasant faith, and at that a Jew who had been one of the most radical exponents of between-war German expressionism, seemed as much a miracle as the most extreme claims from Lourdes.

When Fox acquired the film rights to Bernadette it was decided that the perennial production line, for once, would not suffice for this sanctified subject. From earliest pre-production, Fox's publicity made much of the incredibly painstaking verisimilitude of Bernadette's physical preparation. Aware that a "star" in the title role would negate all preparatory exertions, producer Darryl Zanuck and director Henry King finally settled on unknown Jennifer Jones (née Phyllis Isley) as Bernadette. The choice was fortuitous, as was the less difficult assignment of casting the film's composer.

Alfred Newman had been music director at Fox since the war began. Although of Jewish ancestry, he had never attended synagogue regularly, nor had he been known to espouse any other faith. Only tangentially, in scores like Fox's classic March/Laughton Les Miserables, or the RKO/Laughton Hunchback of Notre Dame, had Newman confronted the Christian faith. No conspicuously religious title, however, could be found on Newman's nearly hundred-film résumé as Bernadette loomed on his horizon in the fall of 1943.

Taking full advantage of the reverential treatment accorded Bernadette in all other aspects, Newman gained a consideration from Zanuck, which would have been heaven on earth for a staff composer, but was unprecedented for a studio music director/executive. He was promised two undistracted months to compose and record Bernadette. As a case in contrast, cast back to 1939 when David Selznick gave Max Steiner a similar length of time to underscore the mammoth Gone With the Wind. Steiner produced a 150 minute score, with the help of several uncredited allies and a steady supply of pills. (He also wrote three other scores during the same period, twelve in total that year!) Now Newman was not about to pass through that kind of purgatory, even for the sake of a saint. For the duration, though, he set up residence in a bungalow on the Fox lot, sleeping little and being seen less in what must have seemed monastic isolation exceptional under the studio system.

When The Song of Bernadette premiered as Fox's 1943 Christmas feature, its success, if anything, exceeded the book. Critics rhapsodized over the dignity of its presentation, the sobriety of its treatment, and, most of all, the luminous Miss Jones, who, although 24, perfectly conveyed the simplicity and spirituality of Bernadette Soubirous, from age 14 to her death at 35. By the end of 1944 the film had become the most profitable feature in Fox history. Its $7 million gross (average ticket 50 cents!) demonstrated that, contrary to Hollywood wisdom, the public was not averse to serious religious subjects, and paved the way for two decades of religious epics, few of which received the reverence and affection lavished on Bernadette, by studio or public.

Among Bernadette's four Oscars (it lost Best Picture to Casablanca) was Newman's only Academy Award for Original Score (he won eight more for adaptation). Along with Miklos Rozsa's Jungle Book, the commercial release of a four disc 78 set from Bernadette by Decca set a precedent for attention-getting scores in the future. Before this, "movie music" was not deemed commercially viable (amazingly, even Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz had no albums at their initial release).

In case we should cluck at our benighted grandparents, let us note that Newman's magnificent original soundtrack performances are, in this two CD set, receiving their first commercial release. That one hundred minutes of music of this stature has sat (safe, in this case) in studio storage for fifty-five years suggests a few unpalatable (and unprintable) truths about our musical culture. (As noted in this issue's Phantom Menace review, the market meanwhile tolerates multiple recordings of most of John Williams' epics.) I have long regarded this score as the high-water mark of Newman's early career. If Steiner's Tara transports us instantly both in time and space, Newman's Bernadette transports us beyond both. This is among the saddest and, paradoxically, most radiant music ever to emerge from a soundtrack. And, even more than the acknowledged When You Wish Upon a Star, the inspiration for Williams' celebrated finale in Close Encounters. Charles Gerhardt recorded a loving version of Bernadette's roadshow overture for his Newman RCA tribute, but, perhaps because that album was a relative failure among the Gerhardt/Wilkinson projects, the greatness of this work still remains unacknowledged by the general public, and by the film music critics. The Gerhardt eight-minute excerpt doesn't begin to do justice to Newman's accomplishment. Only when the music is divorced from the images can we begin to comprehend its complexity but, conversely, only when we watch the film can we experience fully its inspiration. For the compassion, which is Bernadette's true glory, is only fully revealed in conjunction with the imagery, and its beauty is best appreciated as the spirit behind the rather impassive, if lovely, features of Miss Jones. Never has a character on screen been more completely evoked by music. Yet Newman confessed that he found his inspiration in nature, not the supernatural. For example, the grotto vision music takes off from the rustling of leaves wonderfully evoked by the wind section. Christopher Palmer informs us that Franz Werfel and his wife Alma, widow of Gustav Mahler, who attended the recording sessions, were "profoundly moved" by this vision sequence (contrast the Penguin Guide reaction to the same cue, "effective though essentially tasteless"!).

The hundred minutes of Newman "high-strings piety" (Ian Lace's phrase, in an essentially favourable review) have already been acknowledged as a bit too much of a good thing ("rather too rich a feast", again in Lace's words). There is truth in this, although I'm not sure it is entirely a musical judgement - most of us don't care to spend too much time with real-life saints either. Although in the context of the film, and with the interruption of unscored sequences, the music's essentially sorrowful cast does not weary the watcher, it can seem oppressive to one's sensorium when strictly an aural experience. After all, I don't know too many of us who are able to - or even want to - sustain any emotional peak (or valley) more than a few minutes. However, married to the image of Miss Jones on screen*, in the original dramatic context, this intensity of musical expression (e.g. the unbearable sequences Destiny, The Farewell and the heartbreaking The Spring is Not for Me) is absolutely right and unforgettable. So it is with the thematic repetition, in particular the four occurrences of the "vision" intro, which are not (consciously) noticed while you watch the film, but can become redundant detached from the miraculous events on screen. Once this is understood, one can go back to wondering at the musical miracle now available, for the first time, in its completeness, complexity and infinite compassion.

The re-mastered sound on this set is almost always vivid and fairly clean, particularly with a slight volume boost and high cut to take the edge off the dominant strings. There seems to be genuine stereo in the choirs, but the orchestra sits stubbornly in the mono middle. Jon Burlingame, who is writing a book on the Newmans of Hollywood, does not explain this in the excellent booklet notes. There are also four supplementary tracks, only the first being identified as to its intended use. This track, blessedly, is an alternate (longer) take of Commission Convenes, which, with the similar Rumours of Healing, is one of the most staggering musical cues ever to be composed for a film. Newman begins with a brass chorale, which in the film (and four years before, in the Hunchback) stands for the majesty of the Catholic Church. Over this dramatic base, the wind choir breathes the gently tentative nature of Bernadette's faith while, from the lower reaches of the string section, spiralling figures (deriving from the wispy, whirling winds of the grotto sequences) ascend to a final exultant statement of the vision theme. This is virtuosity at the Korngold/Herrmann level. It is also something far beyond virtuosity. While I may feebly fumble to find words adequate to describe this brilliant sequence, I am, at the deepest level, all the time wary of such scrutinizing. Like the healing waters of Massabielle, which yield not their secret to chemical analysis, the wells of artistic inspiration will not submit to the cold light of science, even the science of aesthetics. Finally, to borrow from Bernadette's title card, for those who respond to the agony and affirmation of this glorious music, no explanation will be necessary. For those who don't, on the other hand, no explanation will be possible.

* Newman didn't exactly need a female saint to inspire him, but virginal heroines frequently elicited from the composer his purest inspirations: witness the sublime themes for Cathy/Merle Oberon (Wuthering Heights); Angharad/Maureen O'Hara (How Green Was My Valley); Camilla/Wanda Hendrix (Prince of Foxes); Catherine/Jean Peters (A Man Called Peter); Miriam/Betta St. John (The Robe); and Anne/Millie Perkins (The Diary of Anne Frank).