Brian Tibbs Music

Much ink and “ink” have been spilled about Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo. This includes reference to, if not discussion of, how the musical score (composed by Bernard Herrmann) evokes Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. However, many such articles that I've seen assert that Herrmann’s music does not directly quote from Wagner’s score.

However, the score for Vertigo does quote Wagner, albeit very subtly.

Please note that this is not an analysis of Herrmann’s score, but an examination of its musical connections to Tristan und Isolde. Before doing that, however, I’ll offer a quick overview of how Vertigo’s story parallels the story in Tristan. You may jump to the musical analysis if you prefer.

Also, throughout this article I assume the reader is familiar with the plot and characters of Vertigo.

Also, throughout this article I assume the reader has basic familiarity with the plot and characters of Vertigo, as well as the plot and characters of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

Story Parallels between Vertigo and Tristan und Isolde

The story parallels are broad and inexact, but I do believe they were used intentionally to evoke Wagner’s story of mad, doomed love.

First, a rundown of character parallels:

• The character of John/Scottie fundamentally parallels that of Tristan: one is a knight and the other is a policeman (both a kind of law-keeper), and both fall obsessively in love with a woman, leading them to fail to uphold the law.
• Madeleine/Judy is parallel with Isolde: while pretending to be Madeleine, she betrays her husband to fall in love with the knight/policeman. As Judy, she genuinely falls in love with Scottie, despite her original intent to spurn him.
• Gavin Elster is analogous to King Marke: Elster is a magnate in the shipping industry, Marke is king of Cornwall.
• Midge Wood parallels Brangane and/or Kurwenal: she is a mothering figure (as Brangane was to Isolde) and tries to draw Scottie away from his madness/obsession for Madeleine, as both Brangane and Kurwenal did for Isolde and Tristan.

Next, a few story parallels:

• Sailing ships:
  • The first act of Tristan und Isolde takes place entirely on a ship crossing the sea from Ireland to Cornwall.
  • When Scottie first meets Elster, it is in Elster's office at the shipping company, which is thoroughly adorned with ship imagery, and on the back wall of which is a painting of a sailing ship heading into dark clouds toward land.
• Arranged marriage:
  • Isolde is being escorted by Tristan to fulfill an arranged marriage with King Marke of Cornwall.
  • Elster married his wife only to gain access to her family’s shipping fortune, which is a kind of arranged or strategic marriage.
• Water and drowning:
  • While on the ship, Isolde wishes for the sea to rise up and sink the ship rather than face her fate of a loveless arranged marriage.
  • Madeleine throws herself into San Francisco bay to drown herself. This is also a reversal of the original Tristan story (not Wagner’s version) in which Isolde finds Tristan washed up on a beach.
  • Later, when Madeleine and Scottie first kiss, it is on a beach with large crashing waves in the background.
• Love potion:
  • While on the ship, a despondent Isolde asks Brangane to give both she and Tristan a death potion, but instead Brangane gives them the love potion that causes them to fall madly in love with each other.
  • After Madeleine throws herself in the bay, Scottie rescues her and takes her to his apartment. By this time Scottie has already become obsessed with her, and he says rather insistently, “You better have some coffee”. The act of him giving the "potion" to her, and her accepting it, is made very obvious in the framing of the shots, and the entire scene is “littered” with cups, glasses and vessels of various kinds.
• Eros vs. the inauthentic
  • In both Vertigo and Tristan und Isolde, the deep passion of the lovers is set in contrast with relationships not based in love, the arranged marriage with King Marke, the opportunistic marriage of Elster to his wife, or the cynical abandonment of Carlotta by her wealthy lover.
• Death:
  • As already mentioned, Isolde wishes death for herself rather than accede to the arranged marriage.
  • Madeleine is haunted by the prior death of Carlotta, and wishes for death herself.
  • At the end of Tristan und Isolde both Isolde and Tristan have died.
  • At the end of the first half of Vertigo, Madeline has plunged to her death and Scottie in a state of living death as he mourns for Madeleine.
• Wahn and vertigo:
  • Wagner often dealt with the emotion or mental state of wahn, a German word translated as madness, mania or delusion, and his librettos for both Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger actually use the word wahn. In Tristan und Isolde the word is used to describe the blind intensity and solipsism of their love.
  • The term vertigo describes a state of dizziness or unbalance, which I see as broadly analogous to Wagner’s wahn. You could easily say that Scottie is mad or deluded in his obsessive love for Madeleine.
• Violating an oath or mandate:
  • Tristan is a knight under oath to serve the king, an oath he violates in his love for and tryst with Isolde. In the opera, the pair are discovered in the clear light of day, and there is a sort of public trial where Tristan is confronted with his failure by the law, i.e., King Marke.
  • Scottie is a policeman whose job is to protect and serve, a job he fails to uphold in his failure to save his fellow policeman in the beginning, and later his failure to save Madeleine. The result is a courtroom scene where the legal system publicly confronts him with this failure.
• Keeping a lonely watch:
  • There is a brief scene in Vertigo of Midge driving up outside Scottie’s apartment at night, and her disappointment at seeing Madeleine leaving. There is a plausible parallel to be drawn between this and the scene in Tristan und isolde where Brangane keeps watch while the two lovers tryst. In the opera, Brangane sings, “Einsam wachend in der nacht”, or “Alone I watch in the night”.

Lastly, a word about the complexity and implausibility of the plot of Vertigo. I’ve seen it said that the plot becomes more implausible the more you watch the film, and I agree with that assessment. At first, this vexed me, but I’ve concluded that the implausibility lends a sort of fairy tale quality to the film. This would be another parallel to Tristan und Isolde, which also has the quality of a fairy tale.
 

Musical Connections between Vertigo and Tristan und Isolde

As stated earlier, there appears to be a fairly pervasive opinion that Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo does not quote Tristan und Isolde. This seems most often to be said with reference to the cue Scene d’amour, heard when Judy finally appears to Scottie as the "reincarnation" of Madeleine and Scottie's obsession is finally sated. And it is true that the music for that scene strongly evokes the Liebestod (literally “love death”) of Tristan und Isolde without sounding exactly like it.

However, the Vertigo score actually does quote Wagner, albeit in rather subtle ways. First, we need to familiarize ourselves with the opening gesture of the prelude to Tristan und Isolde, from which Herrmann quotes:

The chord on the downbeat of the third bar is the so-called Tristan chord, famous for its musical ambivalence (as either a diminished seventh chord or a kind of sixth chord). The Tristan chord resolves incompletely into a dominant seventh chord.

Herrmann uses literal statements of the Tristan chord in at least three places, and a variant of the chord in other places, to convey the ambivalence and confusion between Judy and her deceptive portrayal of Madeleine.

• In the scene when Scottie and Madeleine visit the mission of San Juan Bautista and Madeleine is running into the church, she pauses to look up at the bell tower and we hear the Tristan chord in tense tremolo strings. This is followed immediately by the so-called Vertigo chord when we cut to a shot of the tower. It is worth noting that Madeleine is wearing her iconic gray suit in this scene, gray no doubt also symbolizing ambivalence. (see video of this moment)
• In the later scene when Judy is packing her things to leave, she goes to her closet and reveals the gray suit she wore while pretending to be Madeline, and we hear the Tristan chord as she reaches up and touches the suit. (see video of this moment)
• Later, when Scottie is waiting for Judy to return from her makeover, he stands in the doorway of her apartment looking anxiously down the empty hallway. The film cuts back to him, then back to the hallway and we see Judy appear around the corner, wearing the gray suit. As she appears, we hear another literal statement of the Tristan chord. (see video of this moment)
• Much earlier in the film there is a chord that, while not identical to the Tristan chord, evokes a very similar harmony: this is when Scottie has saved Madeleine from the bay and taken her unconscious body to his car. We hear that chord as she begins to revive, and it carries us through into the following scene in Scottie’s apartment. It is probably significant that she is wearing the gray suit in this scene. (see video of this moment)
• Similarly, in the fireplace scene in Scottie's apartment, he asks her if she remembers where she was, and we hear the same chord with an ascending motif on top that very much evokes the opening of Tristan & Isolde. (see video of this moment) 

The second literal quote from Tristan und Isolde is the rising 4-note chromatic motif in the fourth bar of the example above. That motif is, in fact, the very first musical statement we hear after the opening title sequence as the rooftop chase scene commences, in a tense and fretful 16th note ostinato. (see video of this moment)

This ostinato recurs about midway through the film when Scottie is trying to stop Madeleine from running up into the bell tower. (see video of this moment). It is worth noting that we do not hear this ostinato in the final scene when Scottie has conquered his vertigo and is able to ascend to the top of the tower (there is actually no music as he forces Judy up the stairs of the tower).

Finally, and crucially, the 4-note chromatic ascending figure is used in the Scene d’amour as Scottie is waiting for Judy to re-do her hair in the style of Madeleine. Not only does Herrmann use that motif, but it is very much a direct quote, i.e., it is enharmonically the same four notes as in the opening of Tristan. This is a big part of why the passage so strongly evokes Wagner’s Liebestod. (see video of this moment)

Herrmann also uses an inversion of the motif, a 4-note chromatic descending motif often heard when invoking Madeleine’s mysterious connection with Carlotta.

Herrmann’s skillful use of those chords and motifs from Tristan und Isolde are a wonderful example of quoting musical source material in a way that is strongly evocative of the original without “hitting people over the head” with the quotations.

Written by Brian Tibbs