This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll think inside the box, with music from classic Christmas television specials.
“The Snowman” (1982), based on the picture book by Raymond Briggs, is about boy whose snowman comes to life and whisks him away on a journey to the North Pole. The show became enormously popular in the UK and through occasional showings on U.S. television. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. Like the book, the film is wordless, using animation and music to tell its story, with the exception of an enchanting interlude, known as “Walking in the Air,” which employs a boy treble. “Walking in the Air” is easily the best-known music by Howard Blake.
The television film “The Homecoming” (1971) stars Patricia Neal and Richard Thomas in a heart-warming story about a rural family Christmas in 1933. Written by Earl Hamner, the film’s success spawned the television series “The Waltons.” Jerry Goldsmith wrote the music. He would return to work on “The Waltons” – though as of “The Homecoming,” he had yet to write the show’s indelible theme.
An adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” (1954) was the subject of a special episode of the anthology series “Shower of Stars.” Fredric March plays Ebenezer Scrooge, and Basil Rathbone is Jacob Marley’s ghost. But it is Ray Middleton, who appears as both Scrooge’s nephew and the Spirit of Christmas Present, who is given arguably the show’s most memorable tune, “A Very Merry Christmas.” The teleplay and lyrics are by Maxwell Anderson, and the music is by Bernard Herrmann!
Finally, Christmas time is here, happiness and cheer, with “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1965). We’ll hear the Vince Guaraldi Trio perform selections from this most beloved of Christmas classics.
For once, the snow has nothing to do with your television reception. I hope you’ll join me for a cookie plate full of classic Christmas specials, on “Picture Perfect,” this Saturday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Spooky comedies. A seeming oxymoron. Perhaps in an attempt to subvert our fears, or to generate laughter from tension, filmmakers have frequently juxtaposed humor with the supernatural – or at any rate death.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll conjure some Hallowe’en spirit with music from four macabre comedies.
Frank Capra’s screen adaptation of “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1944) was actually shot in 1941, but it could not be released until after the hit stage play, by Joseph Kesselring, had concluded its Broadway run.
The film starred Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre, Jack Carson, and Capra favorites James Gleason and Edward Everett Horton.
Two seemingly innocuous spinster aunts poison lonely old men and have them buried in their basement, by a family member who believes that he’s Teddy Roosevelt. (He thinks that he’s digging the Panama Canal.) Massey and Lorre play a murderer on the lam and his plastic surgeon, respectively, who hole up in the house, unaware that Massey’s body count pales next to that of his unwitting hosts.
The score, by Max Steiner, is as manic as Grant’s performance – perhaps a mite overdone, with its breakneck allusions to familiar melodies – but it bears the same distinctive gloss as other Steiner classics like “Gone With the Wind” and “Casablanca.”
Composer Bernard Herrmann will always be most closely associated with the films of Alfred Hitchcock. In particular, his music for the shower scene in “Psycho” has entered the popular consciousness as few other film scores have. Hitchcock and Herrmann collaborated on nine films in all. The first of these was a black comedy called “The Trouble with Harry” (1955), a droll farce about a corpse that materializes in a New England community and can’t seem to stay buried.
Don Knotts and a haunted house – that’s the high concept behind “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” (1966). How could it possibly miss? Knotts’ elastic-faced terror finds a goofy foil in Vic Mizzy’s score. Mizzy also wrote music for “The Addams Family.”
Finally, in a kind of twist on “Topper,” Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis play a recently-deceased couple who try to scare off the inhabitants of their former home, in “Beetlejuice” (1988). In desperation, they enlist the services of a manic “bio-exorcist” (a loosy-goosy Michael Keaton) and things get seriously antic.
The music is by Danny Elfman, as always a fan of Nino Rota, although he also pays homage to the Stravinsky of “The Soldier’s Tale” and frequently alludes to Raymond Scott. There’s even a touch of Bernard Herrmann in one of the tracks, as Elfman evokes the skeleton fight from “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.”
I hope you’ll join me for a mishmash of horror and humor this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Alfred Hitchcock’s most celebrated musical collaborator was Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann scored just about every one of Hitch’s films over the span of a decade, enhancing the impact and memorability of such classics as “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho.” But Hitchcock also worked with any number of other notable composers.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll cast some light into Herrmann’s shadow with selections from “Rebecca” (Franz Waxman), “Strangers on a Train” (Dimitri Tiomkin), “Spellbound” (Miklós Rózsa), and “Family Plot” (John Williams).
Herrmann goes on hiatus, and the suspense is killing us, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
It’s interesting that Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams were born three weeks apart (though separated by two years). Uncle Ralph’s birthday is coming up on October 12, but today is a day to celebrate Holst, born on this date in 1874.
“Gustav” may seem like a strange name for one of England’s greatest composers. Even more peculiar, he was actually christened Gustavus. Also, there was a “von” in his name – Gustavus Theodore von Holst. Holst’s father was of Swedish, Latvian, and German descent. His great-grandfather had also been a composer, who taught harp at the Imperial Russian Court in St. Petersburg. Continuing in the family trade, his grandfather set up shop in England. In doing so, he added the “von,” thinking it lent a little gravitas and that it might help to drum up some business. With the outbreak of war with Germany in 1914, sensibly Gustav dropped the prefix
Like Vaughan Williams, Holst was born in Gloucestershire. Both were students at the Royal College of Music, who studied with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Significantly, they were also linked by a common destiny, spearheading a movement to establish a distinctly “English” national sound in music. They accomplished this by getting their hands dirty, tying on their boots and striking out for the fields and fens, documenting by cylinder and notating by hand songs of the English countryside, already endangered by encroaching industrialization. In some of their best original music, both composers assimilate native folk inflections into their respective styles.
Holst himself was an exacting teacher, who took his duties very seriously. However, in common with the best of his profession, he never imposed his will on his students, but rather shepherded them in finding their own voices and solutions. Holst served as director of music at St. Paul’s Girls’ School, Hammersmith, and at Morley College.
Of course his masterpiece would be “The Planets,” composed between 1914 and 1916. Hard to believe, in a world full of composers schooled on the piano, that Holst’s principal instrument was the trombone! I recall listening to this music for the first time in my teens and thinking “Jupiter,” in particular, exuded “England.” Its roistering, galumphing, perhaps Falstaffian antics give way to a stately, processional theme, later adapted by the composer into the patriotic hymn “I Vow to Thee, My Country.” But with the passage of time, and longer familiarity, “The Planets’” English identity, is detectable to me in every note.
For all that, Holst was never of a provincial mindset. On the contrary, he was a much more adventurous – and frequently modernist – composer than he is frequently given credit for. His literary inspirations were far-flung, from Thomas Hardy to Walt Whitman to Sanskrit. His music is often less emotive than Vaughan Williams’. I’ve always detected more of an objective detachment in Holst’s works. Remarked Vaughan Williams, “He was not afraid of being obvious when the occasion demanded, nor did he hesitate to be remote when remoteness expressed his purpose.”
The two were one another’s most constructive critics. When Holst died, young, at the age of 59, in 1934, Vaughan Williams felt his friend’s passing keenly. Adding to the personal loss of a lifelong companion, from a professional and artistic standpoint, suddenly he was bereft of his most valued confidante and advisor.
Holst’s legacy can be detected best in those composers who reacted against Vaughan Williams and the pastoral school. His economy and restraint appealed to the generation of Walton, Britten, and Tippett. Also – and I never see this remarked upon – I detect his spirit often in the film and concert music of Bernard Herrmann. (Herrmann was a great anglophile, who championed Holst.) There is a certain aloofness, a chill even, in the work of both artists, but also great sensitivity.
Happy birthday, Gustav Holst! You may be regarded by most as a one-hit wonder, but you connected squarely, and the resulting line drive carried further than is generally accepted.
“Jupiter” (1914)
“Beni Mora” (1910)
Bernard Herrmann conducts “The Planets” (complete)
He was irascible, outspoken, and, for those unaccustomed to his quirks, probably a trial to be around. Of course, he was also usually right. Was Bernard Herrmann America’s greatest film composer? When I listen for pleasure, his scores are not always the first that I turn to, but I can’t think of anyone else who so perfectly understood the most effective use of music in film.
This interview – conducted in a noisy cocktail lounge at New York’s Regency Hotel (home of Maxfield Parrish’s Old King Cole mural) – does a pretty good job of conveying the composer in all his ill-humored glory. Herrmann has no hesitation in telling us exactly what he thinks.
At least he has good things to say (after his fashion) about Copland and Korngold. A shame the “Citizen Kane” record with Orson Welles and Joan Sutherland never came to fruition. Also, the idea of a Ravel “Salome” is fascinating.
