Critics fawned over Britten, but I'd rather have Bliss

Telegraph

30-03-2025

Arthur Bliss died 50 years ago this week. He had a profound influence on British musical life but his reputation slipped into decline even before his death, and has only recovered slowly since. The appreciation of his output wavered during his lifetime partly because of his marked changes in style, which left critics surprised or, possibly, confused.
Bliss was born in 1891 and in his 20s came under the influence of the radical European composers of the time, Stravinsky and Ravel. After reading classics and music at Cambridge he studied at the Royal College of Music, but left after just one year to fight in the Great War. He was wounded twice and his experience of war, as well as the interruption of his musical training, affected his approach to composition. The radicalism mostly went out of his style, replaced by a deep romanticism that perhaps owed something to the men who affected his idea of music at the Royal College: Vaughan Williams and Holst, from the generation above him, and his contemporary Herbert Howells.
After his Colour Symphony of 1922 – which shocked Elgar, whom Bliss idolised, with its modernity – his subsequent major works as well as his ballet and film scores were all rooted in romanticism. But first Bliss had to exorcise some demons of the Great War.
Although from a generation that did not parade its feelings, Bliss had been greatly affected by the death of his brother on the Somme. To come to terms with this loss he wrote a choral symphony, Morning Heroes, that had its premiere in 1930. It sets poetry connected to war – including Wilfred Owen's Spring Offensive – that is sung by a chorus and spoken by an orator.
Later in the 1930s Bliss wrote his best-known ballet score, Checkmate and, on the eve of the Second World War, his Piano Concerto. The war years were a lean period for him as a composer, for two reasons. American by parentage, and with an American wife, he was in the United States when war broke out and, too old to fight again, taught for a time at the University of California.
However, he came home in 1942 and, anxious to do something for the war effort, took over from Adrian Boult as director of music at the BBC. In that capacity, he began the planning for what would become the Third Programme, which launched in 1946.
After the death in 1953 of Arnold Bax, Bliss was named Master of the Queen's Music. To many critics this appointment seemed to confirm what an establishment figure he was. Bliss's misfortune in this respect was typified by the virtual disappearance of his choral work The Beatitudes, written for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962. Also written for that occasion was Britten's War Requiem, which, as much because of the critical sycophancy its composer attracted as for the inherent qualities of the respective pieces, completely overshadowed the older man's work.
Bliss is a much better composer than that suggests. In this anniversary year, he merits not merely a revival, but a permanent elevation into the highest rank of our composers.