Susan Alexander’s ill-advised operatic debut is certainly one of the most iconic moments in Citizen Kane, and the sequence is made even more memorable by the fiendishly difficult aria Bernard Herrmann composed for the poor girl.
In a 1973 appearance at the George Eastman House Museum in Rochester, New York, Herrmann discussed this scene and the dramatic rationale behind the score:
“The opera sequence in Citizen Kane presented a unique set of problems. Susan, the young, hopeful singer Kane becomes involved with is partially modeled on a friend of William Randolph Hearst. The problem was to create something that would convey to the audience the feeling of the quicksand into which she is suddenly thrown (by Kane’s inflated estimation of her musical talent and by his obsession with her becoming a success as an opera singer). It had to he done cinematically. It had to be done fast. We had to have the sound of an enormous orchestra pounding her. There is no opera in existence that opens that way. We had to create one…I wrote the piece in a very high tessitura, so that a girl with a modest voice would be completely hopeless in it. I didn’t particularly care to write an opera sequence like this, but Citizen Kane demanded it—not Welles, Citizen Kane. And it’s my contention that no other approach could have solved the problem. Had we played the last scene of ‘Salome’ we’d have gotten the same effect, but it wouldn’t have shown Susan starting an opera (the beginning of ‘Salome’ anybody can sing). The problem was: can she survive this beginning?”
3 Comments
June 29, 2009 at 2:51 pm
This is one of my all time favorite Herrmann moments. Particularly the Gerhardt recording. Love the horns. Speaking of Gerhardt, his On Dangerous Ground sequence is another of my favorite Herrmann moments….
June 29, 2009 at 3:14 pm
The Gerhardt recording of the Death Hunt sequence from On Dangerous Ground is frightening!
Side story: When I was researching Korngold’s film music in grad school, I spent a week going through manuscript materials at the Warner Bros. Archives at USC. When Gerhardt recorded selections from the Sea Hawk in the 1970s, he wreaked havoc on the original conductor’s score–pulling whole sections out, reassembling them in a completely different order, making annotations on the pages with a thick felt marker. I still have a photocopy of a page from the Panama jungle sequence where he wrote in big red letters, “WEIRD!”. Needless to say, the archivists were not big fans of Mr. Gerhardt.
June 29, 2009 at 11:30 pm
HA! I bet he figured they’d crumble to dust before anyone noticed, since not too many studios cared that much about their archives. Worth it, though! His recordings of The Sea Hawk (and Kojian recording from Utah) are the best. The Utah Symphony recording, especially, has incredible playing, that, as good as the new complete recording is, I don’t think matches it. The same goes for just about all of Gerhardt’s recordings, as well as the Fred Steiner recording of King Kong. I think the orchestral playing and the conducting is just superb–so committed, in a way that I don’t think we hear very often these days.