Sir Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss (2 August 189127 March 1975) was a British composer and conductor. Bliss's musical training was cut short by the First World War, in which he served with distinction in the army. In the post-war years he quickly became known as an unconventional and modernist composer, but within the decade he began to display a more traditional and romantic side in his music. In the 1920s and 1930s he composed extensively not only for the concert hall, but also for films and ballet.
In the Second World War, Bliss returned to England from the US to work for the BBC and became its director of music. After the war he resumed his work as a composer, and was appointed Master of the Queen's Music.
In Bliss's later years, his work was respected but was thought old-fashioned, and it was eclipsed by the music of younger colleagues such as William Walton and Benjamin Britten. Since his death, his compositions have been well represented in recordings, and many of his better-known works remain in the repertoire of British orchestras.
Biography
Early years
Bliss was born in Barnes, a London suburb now, but then in Surrey, 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).Burn, Andrew. "Bliss, Sir Arthur Edward Drummond (1891–1975)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, October 2009, accessed 21 March 2011
Agnes Bliss died in 1895, and the boys were brought up by their father, who instilled in them a love for the arts. Bliss was educated at Bilton Grange preparatory school, Rugby and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied classics, but also took lessons in music from Charles Wood. Other influences on him during his Cambridge days were Edward Elgar, whose music made a lasting impression on him, and E.J. Dent.Cole, Hugo and Andrew Burn. "Bliss, Sir Arthur." Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online; accessed 21 March 2011.
Bliss graduated in classics and music in 1913 and then studied at the Royal College of Music in London for a year. At the RCM he found his composition tutor, Sir Charles Stanford, of little help to him, but found inspiration from Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst and his fellow-students, Herbert Howells, Eugene Goossens and Arthur Benjamin.Obituary, The Times, 29 March 1975, p. 14
In his brief time at the college, he got to know the music of the Second Viennese School and the repertory of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with music by modern composers such as Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky.Burn, Andrew. "From Rebel to Romantic: The Music of Arthur Bliss". The Musical Times, August 1991, pp. 383–386; accessed 21 March 2011
When the First World War broke out, Bliss joined the army, and fought in France as an officer in the Royal Fusiliers until 1917 and then in the Grenadier Guards for the rest of the war. His bravery earned him a mention in despatches, and he was twice wounded and once gassed.
His younger brother, Kennard, was killed in the war, and his death affected Bliss deeply. The music scholar Byron Adams writes, "Despite the apparent heartiness and equilibrium of the composer's public persona, the emotional wounds inflicted by the war were deep and lasting."Adams, Byron. "Bliss on Music", Notes, December 1992), pp. 586–588; accessed 22 March 2011 In 1918, Bliss converted to Roman Catholicism.
Early compositions
Although he had begun composing while still a schoolboy, Bliss later suppressed all his juvenilia, and, with the single exception of his 1916 Pastoral for clarinet and piano, reckoned the 1918 work Madam Noy as his first official composition. With the return of peace, his career took off rapidly as a composer of what were, for British audiences, startlingly new pieces, often for unusual ensembles, strongly influenced by Ravel, Stravinsky and the young French composers of Les Six. Among these are a concerto for wordless tenor voice, piano and strings (1920), and Rout for wordless soprano and chamber ensemble (subsequently revised for orchestra), which received a double encore at its first performance.
In 1919, he arranged incidental music from Elizabethan sources for As You Like It at Stratford-on-Avon, and conducted a series of Sunday concerts at Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, where he also conducted Pergolesi's opera La serva padrona. Viola Tree's production of The Tempest at the Aldwych Theatre in 1921, interspersed incidental music by Thomas Arne and Arthur Sullivan, with new music by Bliss for an ensemble of male voices, piano, trumpet, trombone, gongs and five percussionists dispersed through the theatre.Evans, Edwin. "Arthur Bliss". The Musical Times, February 1923, pp. 95–99, accessed 21 March 2011
The Times wrote that "Bliss was acquiring a reputation as a tearaway" 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; in The Manchester Guardian, Samuel Langford called Bliss "far and away the cleverest writer among the English composers of our time";Langford, Samuel. "Bliss's Colour Symphony", The Manchester Guardian, 8 September 1922, p. 9 The Times praised it highly (though doubting whether much was gained by the designation of the four movements as purple, red, blue and green) and commented that the symphony confirmed Bliss's transition from youthful experimenter to serious composer."The Three Choirs Festival", The Times, 8 September 1922, p. 13 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.""Bliss's 'Colour Symphony.' Queen's Hall Concert", The Times, 12 March 1923, p. 15 Elgar, who attended the first performance, complained that the work was "disconcertingly modern."Program notes of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic Orchestra's February 2010 performance
In 1923 Bliss's father, who had remarried, decided to retire in the US. He and his wife settled in California. Bliss went with them and remained there for two years, working as a conductor, lecturer, pianist and occasional critic. While there he met Gertrude "Trudy" Hoffmann (1904–2008), youngest daughter of Ralph and Gertrude Hoffmann. They were married in 1925. The marriage was happy and lasted for the rest of Bliss's life; there were two daughters. Soon after the marriage, Bliss and his wife moved to England.
From the mid-1920s onwards Bliss moved more into the established English musical tradition, leaving behind the influence of Stravinsky and the French modernists, and in the words of the critic Frank Howes, "after early enthusiastic flirtations with aggressive modernism admitted to a romantic heart and [has] given rein to its less and less inhibited promptings"Howes, Frank, "Sir Arthur Bliss – A modern romantic", The Times, 27 April 1956, p. 3 He wrote two major works with American orchestras in mind, the 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 exorcising the spectre of the First World War: "Although the war had been over for more than ten years, 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."Bliss (1970), p. 96, quoted in Palmer, Christopher. "Aspects of Bliss". The Musical Times, August 1971, pp. 743–745, accessed 22 March 2011
During the decade 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, in the words of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "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."Checkmate". Birmingham Royal Ballet, accessed 21 March 2011.
By the late 1930s, Bliss was no longer viewed as a modernist; the works of his juniors William Walton and the youthful Benjamin Britten were increasingly prominent, and Bliss's music began to seem old-fashioned.Kennedy (1989), p. 96Palmer, Christopher. "Aspects of Bliss". The Musical Times, August 1971, pp. 743–745; accessed 21 March 2011 His last large-scale work of the 1930s was his Piano Concerto, composed for the pianist Solomon, who gave the world premiere at the World's Fair in New York in June 1939. Bliss and his family attended the performance and then stayed on in the US for a holiday. While they were there, the Second World War broke out. Bliss initially stayed in America, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. He felt impelled to return to England to do what he could for the war effort, and in 1941, leaving his wife and children in California, he made the hazardous Atlantic crossing.
1940s At first, Bliss found little useful work to do in England. He joined the BBC's overseas music service in May 1941,"New BBC Director of Music", The Times, 1 April 1942, p. 7 but was plainly under-employed. He suggested to Sir Adrian Boult, who was at that time both the chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC's director of music, that Boult should step down in his favour from the latter post.Jacobs, p. 367 Bliss wrote to his wife: "I want more power as I have a lot to give which my comparatively minor post does not allow me to use fully."Kennedy, p. 195 Boult agreed to the proposal, which freed him to concentrate on conducting. Bliss served as director of music at the BBC from 1942 to 1944, laying the foundations for the launch of the Third Programme after the war. During the war, he also served on the music committee of the British Council together with Vaughan Williams and William Walton."News in Brief", The Times, 7 May 1943, p. 6
In 1944, when Bliss's family returned from the US, he resigned from the BBC and returned to composing, having written nothing since his String Quartet in 1941."Bliss, Sir Arthur", Who Was Who, A & C Black, 1920–2008; online edition, Oxford University Press, December 2007, accessed 21 March 2011 He composed more film music, and two ballets, Miracle in the Gorbals (1944),"Sadler's Wells Ballet", The Times, 27 October 1944, p. 6 and Adam Zero (1946)."Arthur Bliss's New Ballet", The Times, 11 April 1946, p. 6