Similar to the Romantic artists of the 19th century, Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann were fascinated with the mix of beauty and longing, violence and death inherent in the human condition. In a shared quest to probe the dark recesses of the mind, the pair unleashed their shadowy poetic vision over eight films: Hitchcock crafted the plot, dialogue, and visuals, while Herrmann’s hyper-expressive scores established the atmosphere and the psychology behind the characters—those unseen elements of a film that haunt us long after the credits roll.

For many, this director-composer relationship reached its apex in Vertigo, a tale of anxiety, obsession, and desire based on the novel D’entre les morts (From Among the Dead), by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. The film traces the steps of Scottie Ferguson, a retired San Francisco detective hired by a friend, Gavin Elster, to follow Gavin’s wife, Madeleine, who he claims is suicidally possessed by her Spanish great-grandmother Carlotta. Scottie and Madeleine fall in love, but the detective later discovers that the object of his infatuation is, in fact, a woman named Judy pretending to be Madeleine after Gavin murdered his wife.

If that plot sounds particularly operatic, there’s good reason: The source novel was a modern twist on the medieval myth of Tristan and Isolde, which had also inspired Richard Wagner’s staged saga of love and death. And like Wagner, Herrmann burrows the audience deep into each character’s psyche by using leitmotifs—recurring musical snippets linked to specific characters or emotions.

In “Scène d’Amour,” Herrmann emphasizes the doomed nature of Scottie and Madeleine’s love by employing the sensual harmonies and lush orchestration of Wagner’s opera. The music slowly raises the temperature of a pivotal scene between the pair, moving from the ethereal sound of muted violins to an all-encompassing climax that embodies the duality of fear and desire, anxiety and ecstasy at the heart of the film.

This scene, more than any other moment in Herrmann’s score, mirrors Wagner’s own description of the musical momentum that drives his Tristan and Isolde: “one long succession of linked phrases to let an insatiable longing swell forth...to find the breach that will show the infinitely craving heart the path into the sea of love’s endless delight.”

— Michael Cirigliano II