''Vertigo'' is a symphony for film and orchestra. None of which is to detract from Hitchcock's glory he knew the nature of the talent he had engaged, and he created extraordinary opportunities for Herrmann to make his mark. It is the music as much as the lighting and the filters that gives those scenes their eerie shimmer. How much, indeed, of this film's famous atmosphere is owed to Herrmann? Close your eyes and think of one sequence, and you may well remember Kim Novak's somnambulistic tour of San Francisco, from a chapel to a graveyard to a picture gallery. Herrmann was an absolute master of the strange art of film scoring, and in a career that stretched from ''Citizen Kane'' to ''Taxi Driver,'' the 1958 ''Vertigo'' was probably his peak. Katz refurbished not just the images but also the sound, bringing digital technology to bear on the Bernard Herrmann score, whose original tape turned up in a vault nearly intact. But there is a second genius at work in ''Vertigo,'' and his voice will be heard more clearly in the restoration.

It would be heresy to suggest that the greatness of ''Vertigo'' is owed to anyone but Hitchcock, whose fingerprints cover every aspect of the production. Robert Harris and James Katz, the film restorers who previously revived ''Lawrence of Arabia'' and ''Spartacus,'' have completed the canonization by releasing ''Vertigo'' in a 70-millimeter, digital-sound version, which opens today (with a video to follow early next year). Scholars have compared it to Proust, ''Tristan und Isolde'' and the Orpheus myth critics have voted it Hitchcock's masterpiece. It is prized not simply for its razor-sharp suspense technique but also for its air of mystery, its tragic dimension, its literary layering of memory and obsession.

NEARLY FOUR DECADES after its commercially indifferent first run, ''Vertigo'' has become the most widely celebrated of Alfred Hitchcock's films.

Master of none chords