Alfred Hitchcock Collectors Guide: Spellbound (1945), Part 5

by Brent Reid

Concerto

  • Rózsa specially adapted his Spellbound Concerto for live performance
  • It’s since become one of the most popular works in classical repertoire
  • Composer devised two lengths and arrangements, others added many more
  • It even had lyrics added for much-recorded easy listening and pop song!

Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.

Spellbound: Writing on a Classic; Making of a Masterpiece; Collectors Guide, Pt 2: Home video, 3: Soundtrack, 4: Re-recordings, 5: Concerto

Spellbound aka 白い恐怖 (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1945) Japanese 1982 re-release poster

Japanese 1982 re-release poster whose title, 白い恐怖, translates as “White Terror”


Contents


Spellbound Concerto

Miklós Rózsa: Spellbound Concerto and The Red House Suite (1951) US Capitol 7"

US Capitol 7″ LP (rear)

Music must have a rare emotional quality to underscore the pictorial grandeur of a sweeping vista, or the poignant intimacy of a love scene on the screen. Miklós Rózsa writes such music, and it has won him the motion picture industry’s Academy Awards and the nation’s highest critical acclaim. Because he believes that the importance of film music should transcend its sound-track version, Dr. Rózsa has prepared this special concert adaptation of some of his finest work, and carefully supervised its interpretation and performance.

Miklós Rózsa’s score to Spellbound was his first to earn the coveted motion picture Oscar, and did much to make the David O. Selznick production a memorable one. Film background music has rarely become so well known, and now, in this concert version, the impact of its dramatic content is especially effective. The music deals with powerful human emotions — the struggle of a great love against the disrupting pressure of a man’s paranoiac fantasies. The strength of that love, between the film story’s woman doctor and her patient, is clearly expressed in the stirring theme of the concerto’s opening moments. A second love theme follows, describing lyrically the less professional, more feminine aspects of the doctor’s personality.

The frightening nature of the hero’s paranoiac attack is heard in the concerto’s most striking theme, one which features the eerie sound of the theremin — the first such use of this weird electronic instrument. Fear and suspense mount insistently with the theme’s development. For a moment of relief, there is a gay and tuneful interlude, but it soon yields to another scene of growing tension — the ski scene, in which the swish of snow, the rushing of the wind, and the swiftly passing landscape are vividly portrayed. As the pace quickens, the threatening music returns, rising in intensity till the climactic moment when the romantic themes are restated triumphantly by full orchestra in a bold declaration of love’s victory. – Capitol vinyl

This second recording of Rózsa’s Spellbound Concerto, following his own 1945 album retooling, is a 1951 rendition which splits it into two parts. Though he personally oversaw the performance and recording, Rózsa stepped down from the conductor’s podium on this occasion.


In 1959, Rózsa conducted a performance by the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra with famed pianist Leonard Pennario. Commencing that same year, this version featured on numerous best-selling LPs until well into the 1970s, but has only made it to CD once.


Another Rózsa-helmed version dates from 1963 which, along with the film’s “Paranoia Theme”, was specially recorded for LP. It was unavailable for decades until resurfacing on a mammoth CD box set.


 

Digital Premiere Recordings from the Scores of Miklós Rózsa (1975) US Varèse Sarabande LP

US LP (rear)

In July 1984, a diverse group of musicians converged on Salt Lake City. Utah: Elmer Bernstein and George Korngold from Los Angeles, Jeffrey Kaufman, Joshua Pierce and Dorothy Jonas from New York, and the present writer from London. We all had one thing in common—an intense love of the music of Miklós Rózsa. We also had the great practical advantage—and the pleasure (for he is no less great a gentleman than a musician)—of Dr. Rózsa’s presence throughout the rehearsals for this album, the two public concerts that preceded the recording, and the recording itself; we can therefore claim that the performances have received the “Royal Imprimatur”! The idea for the album grew out of discussions between the distinguished duo-piano team of Pierce and Jonas, Dr. Rózsa, Tom Null of Varèse Sarabande, producer Kaufman, and myself.

The revised 1984 Spellbound Concerto (here given its World Première Recording) is for two pianos instead of one, and is almost twice the length of the previous version. From the original motion picture score, Dr. Rózsa selected such extra material as could readily be translated into pianistic terms, positioning it congenially, yet with an eye to formal cohesion, within the context of the original concerto. Little in the new version is unrelated to the three basic thematic protagonists (Love Theme I, Love Theme II, ‘Paranoia’or ‘Theremin’ Theme), though inevitably the sequence of musical events is now more closely linked to the film. The concerto is based on the following scenes from the picture: Prelude and Foreword; Love’s Awakening, Paranoia (Gregory Peck and the razor): Scherzo and Trio: Love’s Despair: Dream Sequence: The Train and Ski-run (Rózsa’s virtuosic music which was for some reason not used in the film): Finale.

Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

Ingrid Bergman in a deleted scene from Dalí’s dream sequence

Listeners should know that what was previously the theremin part is here played on the Ondes Martenot, a French electronic keyboard instrument invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot, for which Rózsa had written a solo piece in the 1930s and which he attempted (unsuccessfully) on various occasions to introduce into films. For instance, he had wanted it to play the music for the giant Genie in The Thief of Baghdad, but Martenot was defending the Maginot Line against the invading Germans and was therefore unavailable. When director Alfred Hitchcock and producer David O. Selznick decided they wanted a novel sound for Spellbound, Rózsa again thought of the Ondes; but there was no instrument in the U.S.A., so the theremin was brought in as a substitute. (A curious footnote to this mini-history: a few years ago Rózsa resuscitated the near-extinct theremin for the Steve Martin comedy Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, a film which referred visually to various films of the 1940s, some of which Rózsa actually scored.)

For the full story of Spellbound, Hitchcock and the theremin, readers are referred to Rózsa’s delightful autobiography Double Life (1982/1984/1989); here I must restrict myself to one general observation, namely that, in my opinion, Salvador Dalí’s dream sequences were as powerful a determining influence on the color and temper of the score as a whole as Hitchcock’s direction or Peck’s and Bergman’s acting. It is, too. surely a measure of the score’s quality that long years of familiarity never preclude one’s newly admiring the modulations at the eruptive climax of ‘Love’s Awakening’, the exact aural counterpart of Hitchcock’s famous opening doors; the insistent march-like rhythmic pulse in the ‘Paranoia’ scene, the idée fixe of nightmare; the greatly relieving al fresco exhilaration of the Scherzo; the harmonic half-lights of ‘Love’s Despair’:the percussive ostinati of The Train, all steel, speed and electricity: finally the return of Love Theme II in the recapitulation, one of the grandest perorations in Rózsa. – Christopher Palmer, Varèse Sarabande album

John Emery, Rhonda Fleming and Donald Curtis in Spellbound (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

Help Me, Rhonda: She’s impulsive, to say the least. John Emery, Rhonda Fleming and Donald Curtis try to ménage a tricky situation.

The final commercially released version with Rózsa’s direct involvement saw him in attendance for the first performance and recording of his newly expanded concerto on 30 July, 1984 at Symphony Hall, Salt Lake City. From Joshua Pierce’s website:

In 1984, world-renowned Academy Award winning composer Miklós Rózsa offered to write for the team [piano duo Joshua Pierce and Dorothy Jonas] a work which became the Spellbound Concerto Fantasie for Two Pianos and Orchestra (a work twice as long as the original Spellbound score [sic: Concerto], including material not used on the original soundtrack). He also wrote for Pierce/Jonas his New England Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra based on music from the films Lydia and Time Out of Mind. The première performance took place at Salt Lake City and at Snowbird with the Utah Symphony Orchestra (“…polished and sensitive technicians.” – Paul Wetzel, Salt Lake City Tribune) and subsequent performances with the Midland-Odessa Symphony (“Dynamically performed with precision and technical excellence.” – Skye Osborne, Odessa American, Texas.)

These critically acclaimed performances resulted in the team being invited to give a Command Performance for the Royal Family with the London Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall, London. Their 1991 Chicago début with Paul Freeman and the Chicago Sinfonietta in Francis Poulenc’s Two-Piano Concerto was called “most delightful… a performance of stature” – The Chicago Sun-Times.


Non-Rózsa recordings

There are numerous recordings of the Spellbound Concerto available on disc that have no direct input from Rózsa; I’ll just cover some of the most significant examples.

The earliest I can find dates from 1946 and is by London’s famed Queens Hall Light Orchestra, demonstrating just how quickly the popularity of both film and score sped across the Atlantic.

There’s an excellent 1995 recording that’s appeared on various compilations but the most comprehensive Hitch collection is:


The October 2003 issue of BBC Music Magazine had a cover-mounted CD containing an hour’s worth of superb film soundtrack selections recorded at the BBC Studios in Maida Vale, London, on 17-19 March 2003. It accompanied a two-part documentary, Hollywood Composers, which also featured the filmed performances. This little-known treasure can be picked up very cheaply, either with or without the magazine. 15-16 September 2005 saw another great recorded version laid down at Watford Colosseum, London.


Chamber ensemble version

November 30, 1946, saw the New York Town Hall première of the popular concerto freshly reduced and arranged by Alfonso D’Artega for theremin, piano, oboe and string quartet. The performers on that occasion were famed theremin soloist Lucie Bigelow Rosen with the Koutzen Quartet. The only two records of D’Artega’s early renditions, with him conducting different orchestras, are unfortunately only to be found on rare 8″ and 12″ transcription discs.

After seemingly lying dormant for many years, the pared-down version was revived around the turn of the millennium by the world’s leading thereminist Lydia Kavina. The much younger relative and last protégé of inventor Leon Theremin, she also recorded it and continues to perform it to this day.

The Five Quintet, Szilvási Katalin


Song version

At an indeterminate point early in the concerto’s life, it was rearranged and noted songwriter Mack David added lyrics. Jazz saxophonist and bandleader Coleman Hawkins appears to have been first to release the retooled version, as the B-side to his 1952 cover of the much-recorded standard “Midnight Sun”, with his sax articulating the vocal lines.

There have been various recordings of the ‘pop’ concerto since; perhaps the other best known is Mel Tormé’s easy listening version, which initially backed his take on another much-recorded classic, this time by Cole Porter.

Spellbound: Writing on a Classic; Making of a Masterpiece; Collectors Guide, Pt 2: Home video, 3: Soundtrack, 4: Re-recordings, 5: Concerto


This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.

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