In 1958 Alfred Hitchcock created his masterpiece, Vertigo. Based upon the novel d’ Entre les Morts (The Living and the Dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac Vertigo was, itself, a modern variation of the Tristan myth upon which Richard Wagner based his opera, Tristan and Isolde. A story of love, obsession and enduring passion for a woman obscuring the fragile boundaries separating life and death, Vertigo became the perfect culmination not only of Alfred Hitchcock‘s filmic fears and vulnerability, but of Bernard Herrmann‘s, as well.
 
Bron: bernardherrmann.org

Misunderstood and under appreciated by American audiences at the time of its initial release, Vertigo is considered by most critics today not only Hitchcock‘s greatest work, but one of the greatest motion pictures ever filmed. The picture and its musical scoring by Bernard Herrmann are exquisite jewels. As in his earlier examination of love transcending the vaporous curtain of mortal passage, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Herrmann‘s music for Vertigo is nearly exultant in its expression of mortal anguish and the redemption of love. Herrmann’s own deeply felt longing for love and acceptance is excruciatingly evident in the hauntingly lovely, poignant and exquisitely painful music rapturously caressing the film. Wagnerian it its intensity, Vertigo is at once stunning and torturous. Its searing sensitivity is startling, stripping naked the composer and his own anguished vulnerability. Vertigo is a deeply felt canvas, a sad and beautiful portrait, painted by two of the cinema’s most gifted artists.
 
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