Battle of Neretva is Bernard Herrmann’s score for the 1969 Yugoslav–Italian war epic of the same name, a film dramatizing a major World War II partisan campaign in Bosnia, and it has since appeared in several album incarnations, including remastered and expanded editions. Composed after his classic collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, the music shows Herrmann applying his trademark psychological intensity to large-scale war cinema rather than suspense or horror: he wrote for the London Philharmonic Orchestra, massively augmented with extra brass and percussion (around 120 players), to create a dense, weighty orchestral sound that matches the film’s spectacle. The original soundtrack album (later reissued on labels like Southern Cross and Dragon’s Domain) presents a suite of cues such as Prelude, The Retreat, Separation, Chetniks’ March, Farewell, Partisan March, Pastorale, The Death of Danica, and Victory, forming a roughly 45-minute portrait of the score’s main thematic ideas.Stylistically, the music is neo‑romantic and highly dramatic, but it avoids romanticizing war; instead, reviewers describe it as emphasizing suffering and endurance rather than heroic gloss. Herrmann alternates between suspenseful, low‑lying textures and powerful, often relentless battle cues and marches: trudging, dirge-like passages underscore the plight of displaced civilians, while explosive brass and percussion drive the combat sequences, with some cues reworking material from his earlier scores (notably On Dangerous Ground’s famous “Death Hunt”) into a new, war‑film context. Modern re-recordings, such as the Tribute Film Classics album pairing Battle of Neretva with The Naked and the Dead, expand the available music to around 70–75 minutes and restore previously edited or unused cues, allowing listeners to hear the full architecture of Herrmann’s design and solidifying the score’s reputation as a “knockout” late-career work that stands alongside his more famous Hitchcock and Scorsese collaborations.
