Sir Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss was born on August 2, 1891, and died on March 27, 1975. He was a British composer and conductor. His musical training was interrupted by the First World War, during which he served in the army. After the war, he became known for creating unusual and modern-sounding music. However, within a few years, his style became more traditional and emotional. During the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote music for concerts, films, and ballets.
During the Second World War, Bliss returned to England from the United States to work for the BBC. He became the director of music for the organization. After the war, he continued composing and was appointed Master of the Queen's Music.
In his later years, Bliss's work was respected but considered old-fashioned compared to the music of younger composers like William Walton and Benjamin Britten. After his death, his compositions were widely recorded, and many of his most famous pieces are still performed by British orchestras today.
Biography
Bliss was born in Barnes, a London suburb that was then part of Surrey. He was the eldest of three sons of Francis Edward Bliss (1847–1930), a businessman from Massachusetts, and his second wife, Agnes Kennard (née Davis) (1858–1895).
Agnes Bliss died in 1895, and the boys were raised by their father, who taught them to appreciate the arts. Bliss attended Bilton Grange preparatory school, Rugby, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied classics and also took music lessons from Charles Wood. During his time at Cambridge, he was influenced by Edward Elgar, whose music left a lasting impression on him, and by E.J. Dent.
Bliss graduated in 1913 with degrees in classics and music. He then studied for a year at the Royal College of Music in London. At the RCM, he found his composition teacher, Sir Charles Stanford, to be unhelpful, but he was inspired by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, as well as his classmates, Herbert Howells, Eugene Goossens, and Arthur Benjamin.
During his time at the college, he learned about the music of the Second Viennese School and the works of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which included music by composers like Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky.
When World War I began, Bliss joined the army and fought in France as an officer in the Royal Fusiliers until 1917, then in the Grenadier Guards for the rest of the war. His bravery earned him a mention in despatches, and he was wounded twice and exposed to poisonous gas.
His younger brother, Kennard, died in the war, and this deeply affected Bliss. The music scholar Byron Adams wrote, "Despite the composer's calm and strong public image, the emotional pain from the war lasted a long time." In 1918, Bliss converted to Roman Catholicism.
Although he had started composing as a schoolboy, Bliss later destroyed all his early works, except for a piece from 1916 called Pastoral for clarinet and piano. He considered his 1918 work Madam Noy to be his first official composition. After the war, his career grew quickly as a composer of new and unusual pieces, strongly influenced by Ravel, Stravinsky, and young French composers like Les Six. Examples include a concerto for a wordless tenor voice, piano, and strings (1920), and Rout for a wordless soprano and chamber ensemble (later revised for orchestra), which received a double encore at its first performance.
In 1919, Bliss arranged incidental music from Elizabethan sources for As You Like It at Stratford-on-Avon and conducted Sunday concerts at Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, where he also conducted Pergolesi’s opera La serva padrona. In 1921, Viola Tree’s production of The Tempest at the Aldwych Theatre included incidental music by Thomas Arne and Arthur Sullivan, as well as new music by Bliss for an ensemble of male voices, piano, trumpet, trombone, gongs, and five percussionists.
The Times wrote that "Bliss was gaining a reputation as a rebellious figure" by the time he was commissioned, through Elgar’s influence, to write a large-scale symphonic work (A Colour Symphony) for the Three Choirs Festival of 1922. The work was well received; The Manchester Guardian called Bliss "far and away the cleverest writer among English composers of our time," and The Times praised it highly, though it questioned the use of colors to name the movements. After the third performance of the work at the Queen’s Hall under Sir Henry Wood, The Times wrote, "Continually changing patterns scintillate… till one is hypnotised by the ingenuity of the thing." Elgar, who attended the first performance, said the work was "disconcertingly modern."
In 1923, Bliss’s father, who had remarried, decided to retire in the United States. He and his wife settled in California. Bliss joined them and stayed there for two years, working as a conductor, lecturer, pianist, and occasional critic. While there, he met Gertrude "Trudy" Hoffmann (1904–2008), the youngest daughter of Ralph and Gertrude Hoffmann. They married in 1925, and the marriage lasted for the rest of Bliss’s life; they had two daughters. Soon after the marriage, Bliss and his wife moved back to England.
From the mid-1920s onward, Bliss focused more on the established English musical tradition, moving away from the influence of Stravinsky and French modernists. In the words of critic Frank Howes, "after early enthusiasm for modern styles, he turned to romantic music and allowed his creative impulses to grow more free." He wrote two major works for American orchestras: Introduction and Allegro (1926), dedicated to the Philadelphia Orchestra and Leopold Stokowski, and Hymn to Apollo (1926) for the Boston Symphony and Pierre Monteux.
Bliss began the 1930s with Pastoral (1930). In the same year, he wrote Morning Heroes, a work for narrator, chorus, and orchestra, written in the hope of overcoming the memory of World War I: "Although the war had ended more than ten years ago, I was still troubled by frequent nightmares; they all took the same form. I was still there in the trenches with a few men; we knew the armistice had been signed, but we had been forgotten; so had a section of the Germans opposite. It was as though we were both doomed to fight on till extinction. I used to wake with horror."
During the 1930s, Bliss wrote chamber works for leading soloists, including a Clarinet Quintet for Frederick Thurston (1932) and a Viola Sonata for Lionel Tertis (1933). In 1935, the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians noted that "he firmly established his position as Elgar’s natural successor with the Romantic, expansive, and richly scored Music for Strings." Two dramatic works from this decade remain well known: the music for Alexander Korda’s 1936 film of H.G. Wells’s Things to Come, and a ballet score to his own scenario based on a chess game. Choreographed by Ninette de Valois, Checkmate was still in the repertoire of the Royal Ballet in 2011.
By the late 1930s, Bliss was no longer seen as a modernist; the works of younger composers like William Walton and
Music
Christopher Palmer, a musicologist, was critical of those who described Arthur Bliss's music as showing an early rebellious tendency that quickly gave way to compromise with the musical establishment and a continuation of the traditions of Edward Elgar. However, as a young man, Bliss was seen as innovative. His song "Madam Noy," described as a "witchery" piece, was first performed in June 1920. The lyrics were written by an unknown author, and the piece is performed by a soprano accompanied by flute, clarinet, bassoon, harp, viola, and bass. In a 1923 study of Bliss, Edwin Evans noted that the striking instrumental background of the song, which tells a dark story, set the direction Bliss would follow in his later works. Bliss's Second Chamber Rhapsody (1919) is an idyllic piece for soprano, tenor, flute, cor anglais, and bass. The two vocalists sing only the syllable "Ah" throughout the piece, blending into the ensemble like instruments. Bliss contrasted this pastoral tone with Rout (1920), an energetic piece for soprano and instrumental ensemble. In Rout, the singer performs a series of meaningless syllables chosen for their sound. In his next work, Conversations (1921), for violin, viola, cello, flute, and oboe, Bliss chose a subject that was intentionally simple and everyday. The piece is divided into five sections: "Committee Meeting," "In the Wood," "In the Ball-room," "Soliloquy," and "In the Tube at Oxford Circus." Evans noted that although the instrumentation is clever, much of the interest comes from the layered, complex music, especially in the first and last sections.
Bliss followed these works with three larger compositions: a Concerto (1920) and Two Orchestral Studies (1920). The Concerto, written for piano, voice, and orchestra, was experimental. Bliss later revised it, removing the vocal part. Melée Fantasque (1921) showed Bliss's skill in creating bright, sparkling orchestral music.
Of Bliss's early works, Rout is occasionally performed and recorded, but the first of his works to become widely known in the UK is the Color Symphony. Each of the four movements represents a different color: "purple, the color of amethysts, pageantry, royalty, and death; red, the color of rubies, wine, revelry, furnaces, courage, and magic; blue, the color of sapphires, deep water, skies, loyalty, and melancholy; and green, the color of emeralds, hope, joy, youth, spring, and victory." The first and third movements are slow, the second is a lively scherzo, and the fourth is a fugue, described by Bliss expert Andrew Burn as "a compositional tour de force, a superbly constructed double fugue, the initial subject slow and angular for strings, gradually becoming an Elgarian ceremonial march, the second a bubbling theme for winds." Burn noted that in three works written soon after his marriage, the Oboe Quintet (1927), Pastoral (1929), and Serenade (1929), "Bliss's voice assumed the mantle of maturity … all are imbued with a quality of contentment reflecting his serenity."
Burn observed that many of Bliss's mature works were inspired by external influences. Some were written for specific performers, such as the concertos for piano (1938), violin (1955), and cello (1970). Others were inspired by literary and theatrical collaborators, such as film music, ballets, cantatas, and The Olympians. Some were influenced by painters, such as the Serenade and Metamorphic Variations. Others were inspired by classical literature, such as Hymn to Apollo (1926), The Enchantress, and Pastoral. Of Bliss's works after World War II, his opera The Olympians is generally considered a failure. Critics found its style outdated. A contemporary reviewer wrote, "Bliss has wisely cleared his idiom of modern harmonic astringency. He uses quite a lot of common chords and progressions; in fact, he has gone back to the harmony of the musical gods. The result, inevitably, is a certain air of reminiscence."
Among Bliss's later works, the Cello Concerto is one of the most frequently performed. When its dedicatee, Mstislav Rostropovich, gave the first performance at the 1970 Aldeburgh Festival, Benjamin Britten, who conducted the performance, regarded it as a major work and persuaded Bliss to change its title from "Concertino" to "Concerto." Bliss described it as "an approachable piece of which there are no problems for the listener – only for the soloist."
Both Palmer and Burn noted a dark or unsettling quality that sometimes appears in Bliss's music, such as in the Interlude "Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death" from The Meditations on a Theme of John Blow and the orchestral introduction to The Beatitudes. Burn described such moments as profoundly disquieting. Palmer suggested that the musical style of these passages may be influenced by "the extraordinary spectral march-like irruption" in the Scherzo of Elgar
Honours, legacy and reputation
Arthur Bliss received several honors during his lifetime. In 1969, he was appointed KCVO, and in 1971, he was appointed CH. He earned honorary degrees from the universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lancaster, London, and Princeton. In 1958, the London Symphony Orchestra named him its honorary President. In 1963, he was awarded the Gold Medal by the Royal Philharmonic Society.
Bliss’s personal papers and works are stored at Cambridge University Library. There is an Arthur Bliss Road in Newport, an Arthur Bliss Gardens in Cheltenham, and a building called Sir Arthur Bliss Court in Mitcham, South London.
The Arthur Bliss Society was created in 2003 to help people learn more about and appreciate his music. The society’s website lists upcoming performances of his works. In March 2011, some of the works scheduled for performance in the UK and the United States included Ceremonial Prelude, Clarinet Quartet (two performances), Four Songs for Voice, Violin and Piano, Music for Strings, Pastoral (Lie strewn the white flocks), Royal Fanfares, Seven American Poems, String Quartet No. 2 (five performances), Things to Come Suite (two performances), and Things to Come March.
Many of Bliss’s compositions have been recorded. He was also a skilled conductor and directed some of these recordings. Cambridge University Library keeps a complete list of all recordings of his music. In March 2011, the list included 281 recordings: 120 orchestral, 56 chamber and instrumental, 58 choral and vocal, and 47 stage and screen works. Some of his most frequently recorded works include A Colour Symphony (six recordings), Cello Concerto (six), Piano Concerto (six), Music for Strings (seven), Oboe Quintet (seven), Viola Sonata (seven), and Checkmate (complete ballet and ballet suite, nine recordings).
When Bliss received the Gold Medal from the Royal Philharmonic Society in 1963, he said, “I don’t claim to have done more than light a small taper at the shrine of music. I do not upbraid Fate for not having given me greater gifts. Endeavour has been the joy.” A hundred years after Bliss’s birth, Byron Adams wrote,