Bernard Herrmann

Born in New York City to a Russian-Jewish family, Bernard Herrmann was a combative, uncompromising artist almost from the start. He studied at Juilliard, founded his own chamber orchestra as a young man, and joined CBS radio, where he became a conductor and composer for Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre. When Welles went to Hollywood, Herrmann went with him, and his first film score, for Citizen Kane in 1941, announced a wholly new sensibility: fragmentary, motif-driven, built from short cells rather than long melodies.

That same year he won his only Academy Award, for The Devil and Daniel Webster, released as All That Money Can Buy, beating out his own Kane. He never won again and never seemed to court the Academy's favor. Instead he built a body of work of startling range and psychological depth: the icy theremin of The Day the Earth Stood Still, the aching romanticism of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, the shimmering fantasy of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

His defining collaboration was with Alfred Hitchcock. Across a decade Herrmann gave Vertigo its dizzying, obsessive swirl, North by Northwest its propulsive drive, and Psycho its all-string terror - the slashing violins of the shower scene now the most imitated cue in cinema, written for a film Hitchcock had wanted to leave nearly silent. The partnership ended bitterly in 1966 when Hitchcock rejected his score for Torn Curtain, and Herrmann, unwilling to compromise, decamped to Europe.

A new generation of directors revered him. He scored for Truffaut and De Palma, and Martin Scorsese sought him out for Taxi Driver; Herrmann recorded its brooding, saxophone-haunted score and died in his sleep that same night in December 1975. Difficult, brilliant, and utterly distinctive, he remains the composer other composers study when they want to understand how music makes an audience afraid.