Sir Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss,
CH, KCVO (
August 2, 1891 -
March 27, 1975) was a
British composer.
Born to an American father and English mother, Bliss attended Bilton Grange Preparatory School and Rugby before entering
Cambridge University. He was destined to display characteristics of both nations, his profound
romanticism balanced by an unquenchable energy and optimism. After studying at the
Royal College of Music under
Charles Villiers Stanford, he served as an infantry officer in the
First World War.
With the return of peace, Bliss’s career took off rapidly as a composer of what were, for British audiences, startlingly new pieces, often for unusual ensembles. Among these are a concerto for wordless tenor voice, piano and strings, and
Rout for soprano and chamber orchestra, in which the soloist sings phonetic sounds rather than words. Much of his early music shows the influence of
Stravinsky and
Debussy. A landmark was his
Colour Symphony of
1922 which explores the idea of the musical associations of different colours.
From the late 1920s onwards Bliss moved more into the traditional English musical scene with choral works such as
Pastoral and
Morning Heroes; in the
1930s he wrote the music for the film
Things to Come and the ballet
Checkmate. Bliss was always an ambitious, prolific composer, and some of his works were clearly intended for a wider international audience than they actually received. The
Introduction and Allegro and the Piano Concerto are examples, the concerto being premiered by
Solomon at the
1939 New York World's Fair.
During the
Second World War Bliss became Director of Music at the
BBC, and formed ideas which led to the division of music broadcasting into categories after the war, such as the present day Radios 1 and 3. In 1950 he was
knighted and in 1953 he was appointed to succeed
Arnold Bax as
Master of the Queen's Musick.
By this point in his career, though, it was becoming apparent that Bliss had not attained the level of success he had been aiming for. His
opera The Olympians, despite a full-scale production at Covent Garden, was not popular, his
oratorio The Beatitudes was forgotten beside
Benjamin Britten's War Requiem at the 1962
Coventry Festival, and his cello concerto, written for the Russian cellist
Mstislav Rostropovich, was overshadowed by those of
Benjamin Britten, Henri Dutilleux and
Witold Lutosławski. The concerto received its first London performance from the British cellist
Julian Lloyd Webber. Bliss recorded fine interpretations of several of his major works, but they were not taken up widely by other conductors. His swansong,
Metamorphic Variations, a large orchestral work, was first performed in 1972, but not by
Leopold Stokowski as Bliss had hoped.
The Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra worked with Sir Arthur Bliss when he conducted them in a performance of his Piano Concerto at the 1970
Cheltenham Festival with Frank Wibaut as soloist. An earlier concert performance of the concerto was also given at
Loughborough, again with Sir Arthur Bliss conducting. Later that year, Bliss recorded his
Introduction and Allegro with the orchestra for the
Argo label. The relationship with the LSSO continued well into 1975 with a new production of his ballet
The Lady of Shalott being staged at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre. This occasion was also featured in the television programme
Girl in a Broken Mirror (see external video links below).
Since his death Bliss's music has undergone a modest revival on radio and recordings, but his reputation remains insecure despite the personality of his output.
