Alfred Hitchcock’s Hollywood debut, “Rebecca,” turns 80 this year, and with it, Franz Waxman’s score. It is a now-overlooked masterpiece, a lavish yet deeply interior work that anticipates Bernard Herrmann’s more celebrated music for Hitchcock films in its ability to act as an inner narrator.
In this story of a deceased femme fatale dominating the lives of her husband (who may have killed her) and his new young bride, Waxman faced a daunting challenge, as he revealed in a 1940 speech to the Hollywood Women’s Club Federation: “The really dominant character in the story is dead…yet the entire drama revolves around her.…Whenever a scene involving Rebecca appeared on the screen, it was up to the music to give Rebecca’s character life and presence.” The idea of film music as a “presence” capable of revealing the character of someone living or dead became a Hitchcock signature, but it went against the prevailing notion that film music should be unnoticed and unnoticeable. In Waxman’s view, this precept was absurd: “A motion picture score should be noticed just as much as you notice the other elements.”
Waxman’s complex tapestry of moods and character motifs envelops the movie from beginning to end: The haunted hero and heroine, Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) and his wife (Joan Fontaine), float through the giant rooms in Manderley, Maxim’s imposing manor house, in a sonic dreamscape enhanced by Waxman’s pioneering use of the novachord, an electronic keyboard anticipating the eerie theremin in Hitchcock’s “Spellbound.” The most original cues unveil a music of the subconscious, as in the menacing string glissandos that trouble the heroine’s dreams even before she knows what the nightmares are about, or the descending two-note siren call tempting her to commit suicide as Hitchcock’s claustrophobic camera locks her and her tormentor, the ghostlike Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), in a double close-up framed by Rebecca’s window.
“Rebecca” marked the first time Hitchcock had access to a big Hollywood score, and he used it to maximum effect. Counting Alfred Newman’s Selznick “Trademark” overture, the dense 31/2 -page cue sheet lists 71 items, including two by Johann Strauss. As in “Suspicion,” “Shadow of a Doubt” and “Waltzes From Vienna” (a rare Hitchcock musical depicting the life of the Strauss family), Hitchcock used waltzes as a veneer covering impending disaster, including Waxman’s languid waltz for the catastrophic masked ball and the discordant waltz during Mrs. Danvers’s fiery immolation (complete with spectacular outtakes from the burning of Atlanta in “Gone With the Wind”).
Written under near-impossible circumstances, the score was at the center of behind-the-scenes battles. Legendary producer David O. Selznick had lured Hitchcock to Hollywood and was making “Gone With the Wind” across the street, hiring Waxman as an “insurance composer” in case Max Steiner failed to complete his assignment. The detailed music notes reveal a close working relationship between Hitchcock and Waxman as they struggled against Selznick’s numerous interferences and attempts to rush or water down the score.
The most revealing fight was over the ending of “Rebecca,” where Selznick wanted a huge supernatural R to appear in the clouds. Hitchcock found this idea appalling and stood his ground, having an R monogram on a pillowcase naturalistically go up in flames against a disintegrating brass statement of Waxman’s Rebecca theme.
Hitchcock and Waxman were both European emigrés, the latter having fled the Nazis. The storyline of “Rebecca” fits the emigré pattern. Like Hitchcock and Waxman, its nameless heroine is a stranger in a bizarre but glamorous new world. Manderley is a stand-in for Hollywood, a wondrous but artificial place full of seductive wealth and great peril. Hitchcock had chosen to come to America, but Waxman, who left Germany for Paris and then America after being attacked on a Berlin street by Nazis, could never go back; for him, the Old World was lost forever. It is not surprising that the music of “Rebecca,” despite its silken veneer, has a bleak undertone, nor that its most celebrated cues resurrect a dead past. Yet “Rebecca” thrust Waxman into a promising present. It came out just as he became an American citizen, which he called “the happiest day of my life.”
Mostly ignored in our time, the score for “Rebecca” was so highly regarded when the film was released that Waxman was commissioned to turn it into a concert suite to help sell the picture—a not uncommon practice today, but novel in 1940. “The ‘Rebecca’ Suite,” the predecessor of his popular suites for “Sunset Boulevard” and “A Place in the Sun,” immediately raised his personal cachet as well as that of the film.
Waxman always regarded “Rebecca” as the best of his 144 Hollywood scores, a breakthrough in his career that other movie makers asked him to emulate. Some critics dismiss the score as too Hollywood and too hyperbolic, but François Truffaut got it right when he told Hitchcock that it leaves a “haunting impression,” one that lingers long after Rebecca’s R has gone up in smoke.
—Mr. Sullivan is chair of the English department at Rider University and the author of “Hitchcock’s Music” (Yale).
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