Bernard Herrmann’s Memory Waltzes

While various writers have noted the persistence of waltzes in Bernard Herrmann’s film scores (Steven Smith, Christopher Palmer) and have remarked on their nostalgic tone and narrative purposes (Kathryn Kalinak, Graham Bruce, Steven Smith), the frequent association between waltz and memory in Herrmann’s music warrants further critical exploration. Many of Herrmann’s waltzes narrate the experience of memory, loss, and longing while representing conflicted temporalities. Borrowing the title of a cue from his score for The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), I call these instances “memory waltzes,” cues and other pieces that musically navigate experiences of the past and its tensions with the present. This navigation operates on two levels: first, Herrmann’s frequent design of the waltz to enable audience perception of character interiority; and second, his creation of intertextual echoes among memory waltzes. The first section of this article situates Herrmann’s memory waltzes among twentieth-century precedents that employ the waltz to represent a lost or fragmented past. Exploring the structural logic of Herrmann’s waltzes through Svetlana Boym’s theory of nostalgia, the second section focuses on Herrmann’s own fragmentation techniques in select film scores and chamber works that adopt an artifactual aesthetic to conjure the imagined fullness of the past and its distance from the present. The final section adopts Berthold Hoeckner’s notion of “double projection”—where film music elicits memories of a past film and its score—to explore relationships between Herrmann’s memory waltzes for Vertigo (1958) and the Vertigo-homage Obsession (1976). This case study, which highlights how Herrmann reworks iconic elements of his earlier score, adds complexity to the stylistic and narrative analyses of the preceding sections by considering how waltz intertextuality shapes the perception and reception of Herrmann’s work.