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Helen
Roulston
Helen
Roulston is an Associate Professor of English and Philosphy
and Chair of Film Studies at Murray State University.
From
Citizen Kane to Wuthering Heights:
Bernard
Herrmann's Creation of Gothic-Inspired Operas
Listen
to the audio of this commentary here.
In
the 1930s two lovers of opera from childhood converged in
New York City to forge a longstanding relationship. Bernard
Herrmann's devotion to opera had blossomed when his father
took him as a child to operas. Orson Welles loved opera
ever since he had played the love child in a Chicago production
of Puccini's Madama Butterfly. As adults, Herrmann and Welles
collaborated on many radio programs in New York City, including
the infamous Halloween War of the Worlds in 1938. When Welles,
the latest Hollywood wunderkind, started to film the gothic
Citizen Kane, which included the story about Kane's second
wife, Susan Alexander, forced into an operatic career, he
asked Herrmann to score the movie, during which he could
incorporate parts of operas and to compose his own aria
for Susan to sing.
A
few years after Citizen Kane was released in 1941, Herrmann
started composing his only opera, Wuthering Heights, completed
in 1951. Lucille Fletcher, Herrmann's wife and author of
the radio play and movie, Sorry, Wrong Number, wrote the
libretto for the opera, which contains a prologue and four
acts, based on the first half of Brontë's gothic novel and
poems by her and Fletcher. A Wagner devotee, Herrmann inserted
part of the overture to Tannhäuser into Citizen Kane's score
during "The News on the March," with a shot of the Chicago
Opera House, to stress the contrast between Kane's relationships
with Emily and Susan and Tannhäuser's with Elizabeth and
Venus. Also in Citizen Kane, Susan enchants Kane with part
of the first section of Rosina's aria, "Una Voce poco fa,"
from Rossini's The Barber of Seville. Rosina, in love with
Lindoro (Count Almaviva in disguise), is obedient, as is
Susan.
But
near the end of the second section, which Susan does not
sing, Rosina threatens to rebel, as does Susan, who forces
Kane to halt her hopeless operatic career. The first part
appears again during the infamous singing lesson with Signor
Matisti, who cries, "Impossible, impossible." For Susan's
debut, at Welles's request, Herrmann composed two parts
of an aria from a new opera, Salaambo, to be sung at the
start and end of the production of the opera. He deliberately
wrote the tessitura, the pitch range most frequently occuring
within a piece of music, to be way above the range of Jane
Forward, dubbing Susan's voice, and sadistically composed
the overly heavy orchestration to make her appear to be
straining and drowning in quicksand. Hermann's wife, Lucille
Fletcher, wrote the lyrics, which reflect Susan's own torment.
She begins:
Ah!
Cruel, tu m'as trop entendu!
Ah,
cruel one, you have listened to me too much.
At
the end, the heroine and presumably Susan herself beg to
be slain:
Voila
mon coeur, frapper
Behold
my heart, strike
Prête-moi
ton épée, frapper.
Give
me your sword, strike.
After
Susan's attempted suicide, heard in the background is an
orchestral rendering of "Una Voce poco fa," including: "lo
giurai, la vincerò," "I have sworn it, I will win." She
does win because Kane relents and hauls her off to Xanadu.
When Welles was to play Rochester in the 1944 movie of Jane
Eyre, directed by Robert Stevenson, his friend and previous
collaborator, Herrmann, was asked to compose the score.
Herrmann became so immersed in the Brontës that he soon
began his opera on Wuthering Heights and was further inspired
in 1946 after visiting the Brontë homestead and "High Withens,"
the original Wuthering Heights.
The
orchestration for the opera recalls Wagner, Strauss, Puccini,
and Debussy, while the arias, based on the poems, echo the
folk-like songs of Copland, Delius and Vaughn Williams.
In both Citizen Kane and Wuthering Heights, as Wagner did
in his Ring Cycle, Herrmann employed leitmotifs, recurring
musical themes, associating certain pieces of music with
a particular person, place, or idea. One of these motifs,
introduced in the Prelude to the opera, is Heathcliff's
motif, which is like the "Rosebud" motif of lost innocence
in Citizen Kane and Elektra's cry of "Agamemnon!" in Richard
Strauss's Elektra. Hermann's daughter, Dorothy, and wife,
Lucille, said that Wuthering Heights meant more to him than
any other of his musical works and was "the closest to his
talent and heart."
However,
he never saw his three-hour-plus opera performed, and he
ended up financing and conducting his own recording of the
opera in London in 1966. After his death, the Portland (Oregon)
Opera performed a shortened version of Herrmann's opera
on November 6, 1982. On Valentine's Day in 2001, Paris,
Tennessee's, acclaimed actress, Cherry Jones, narrated excerpts
from Wuthering Heights during a sold-out concert in New
York City, billed as "Bernard Herrmann: More than the Movies."
New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini asserted: "It was
fascinating to hear, especially in this ardent and involving
performance."
Hermann's
inspired gothic Wuthering Heights deserves a full-scale
production by a first-class company so that the devotees
of his movie scores, including that of the opera-enhanced
Citizen Kane, could experience how the work closest to Herrmann's
own heart influenced his musical direction.
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