Bernard Herrmann - Fahrenheit 451: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1966/1995) Conducted by Bernard Herrmann

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Bernard Herrmann - Fahrenheit 451: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1966/1995) Conducted by Bernard Herrmann

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After suffering the humiliation of having his score for Alfred Hitchcock's 1966 film Torn Curtain tossed aside and replaced, Bernard Herrmann turned right around and set to work on a film score that many feel contains his finest work: Fahrenheit 451, released in 1967 by Universal. The movie, which is director Francois Truffaut's sole English-language film, puts on celluloid Ray Bradbury's classic and terrifying novel of the same name – a tale of a not-so-distant future in which books, any and all books, are deemed to be subversive by a repressive mega-government. Herrmann's score proves once again that some of the finest film scoring efforts achieve their greatness by going firmly against the superficial grain of the film. The Fahrenheit 451 score is intense, human, and deeply personal (and, as such, sometimes quite unhappy or ugly) in a cinematic world that is cold and absolutely inhuman.

What Herrmann provides is less a depiction of or even response to the elements of plot and cinematography, but more a ticket into some internal cross-section of the protagonist, Guy Montag, that finds its way to the screen only fleetingly. Beyond that, it is a musical bill of faith in the eternally unbreakable human spirit, an element that comes into the movie only at its very end. The movie often moves along in two very different layers – sight and sound (film proper) and musical score – and the effect can be overwhelming.

This duality is apparent even at the very opening of the film. Herrmann's music for the brightly-colored, strikingly cut opening credits (which are read aloud, no words on the screen, as indeed there shouldn't be as one enters a realm devoid of books) is light and airy, with harp arpeggios, tinkling percussion, and shimmering strings. The music and film would seem to have nothing at all to do with one another, and the effect is perfect. There is also a certain mysteriousness to that opening music, a hint of darkness each time the densely scored lower strings come in, sometimes with chords that have nothing to do with the music above. Here the music itself has two layers – a hint from Herrmann of things to come.

Some cues, such as The Bedroom, burn with passion (in this future society there is no room for romance). Others, like Fire Engine, just after the opening credits, in which the fireman go about their business of burning books, are terrifyingly mechanized, and at the end of the film The Road takes one to a warm, but pained, world within a world, where people commit books to memory with the hope that someday the precious legacy might be restored.

Blair Johnston, Allmusic.com

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Bernard Herrmann - Fahrenheit 451: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1966/1995) Conducted by Bernard Herrmann

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Bernard Herrmann - Fahrenheit 451: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1966/1995) Conducted by Bernard Herrmann

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