Analysis of Bernard Herrmann's filmscore for Citizen Kane

Introduction

The filmscore I am going to investigate belongs to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane from 1941, by many connaiseurs regarded best film of all times. Filmcomposer Bernard Herrmann, who actually hated to be regarded as ‘just’ a filmcomposer and therefore prefered to be respected as a composer who also wrote for film, was asked to write the music. Herrmann is most commonly known for his collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock where movies like Vertigo and Psycho thank their haunting psychological thrill to Herrmanns scores. He was a conductor of concertmusic in New York as well. He died when his last motion picture, Taxidriver of Martin Scorsese had its final cut in 1976.
As a matter of fact, with Citizen Kane Herrmann was in the tremendously luxuary and rarely occuring position of writing music for certain sequences (the opening) to which Welles moulded the picture, instead of the other way around. Herrmann says about this: "Many of the sequences of the film were tailored to match the music".
It is interesting to notice that Citizen Kane brings together the two time-artforms film and music, without making either one of them inferior to the other.
Another point of interest is how the complexity of the dealing with time in this film, especially the one of leaping forward in time (within a split second), or the one of flashbacks, thanks its comprehension to the thematic drive of the music. This becomes very clear in the Breakfastmontage for instance.