CHSA 5344 – BLISS

Bliss: Works for Brass Band

Introduction

With Kenilworth and The Belmont Variations , Sir Arthur Bliss (1891 – 1975) contributed two enduring classics for brass band that remain greatly admired and enjoyed by musicians and audiences alike. Little wonder, then, that this enthusiasm led bands and arrangers to seek other Bliss works suitable to add to the repertoire, such as Eric Ball and the masterly Four Dances from the ballet Checkmate , Phillip Littlemore and the Suite from Things to Come , and the three arrangements specially made for this recording by Robert Childs and Michael Halstenson. Taken together, the works recorded here reflect core aspects of the music of Bliss: the inherent drama of his scores for film, ballet, and television; his flair for the ceremonial, especially in the context of his position as Master of the Queen’s Music; and his sheer professional accomplishment in responding to commissions. In the notes that follow, the works are discussed in chronological order.

Things to Come

During the 1930s, the British film industry was enlivened by the Hungarian-born film director Alexander Korda, whose notable legacy included The Private Life of Henry VIII and Things to Come , the latter based on H.G. Wells’s novel The Shape of Things to Come (1933). At Wells’s invitation, Bliss wrote the music for the film, which quickly attained the status of the first great British score for the medium. Wells instinctively understood the importance of music for heightening a film’s action, insisting that Bliss be an integral member of the artistic team.

Much of the music was composed and recorded before filming began, but once the film was completed, modifications became necessary, which were skilfully undertaken by Muir Mathieson, who had conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the recording. One scene, though, ‘Machines’, was shot exactly to the score. Bliss conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the first performance of his concert suite, compiled from the film score, at a Queen’s Hall Promenade Concert on 12 September 1935. The film was first screened at the Odeon, Leicester Square, on 21 February 1936.

In the novel, Wells envisioned a catastrophic war that would last for decades, the near destruction of humanity, the building of a new society, and the beginning of the space age. Wells viewed the book as a parable, hoping that it would be, as Bliss commented in his autobiography, As I Remember ,

an educative lesson to mankind, to emphasise the horror and uselessness of war, the inevitable destruction of civilised life, the rise of gangster dictatorship and oppression.

Phillip Littlemore chose four movements of Bliss’s concert suite for the arrangement he prepared in 2016. ‘Ballet for Children’ is taken from the film’s opening scene, set in Everytown, in which children are enjoying a Christmas Day party. The youngsters are seen playing with tin soldiers, trumpets, and drums, and although superficially the music evokes the spontaneous gaiety of play, Bliss injects ominous undertones by means of low menacing chords that sound like distant explosions. ‘Machines’ accompanies one of the finest cinematic sequences of the production, in which the robotic machines of the future rebuild the new world, creating vast cities underground, constructed of steel.

The lofty music of ‘Reconstruction’, coloured by Elgarian inflections, is adapted from the final sequence of the film, in which a young man and woman are launched into space for humanity’s first mission to the moon. The ‘March’ superbly captures images of warring armies, mayhem, and destruction, as well as the valour and courage of combatants. The melody of its contrasting section, sorrowful in character, suggests a weary humanity locked in never-ending strife, yearning for peace.

Kenilworth

In 1935, Bliss was commissioned to write a series of articles for The Listener (the BBC’s house magazine of the day), charting musical activity across England, Scotland, and Wales and the impact on it of broadcasting. For the fifth ‘Musical Britain’ portrait, Bliss visited ‘Four Lancashire Towns’, in which, at Westhoughton, near Bolton, he attended a rehearsal of the Wingate’s Temperance Band, enthusing that it

bears one of the most famous names in the country... These bands are a very distinctive feature in English musical life... The players are all amateurs in the sense that they all have their own skilled work to do outside music... Their rules are nearly as rigid as those of football teams... and the competitions culminating in the annual Crystal Palace festival are tests of training and discipline.

In his autobiography, he reflected that he was astounded at the virtuosity of the players:

Hearing the sound these twenty-four players can produce, it did not take much to persuade me in the following year to write the Test Piece Kenilworth .

The stimulus for the work came jointly from a visit which Bliss and his wife, Trudy, made to Kenilworth Castle, in Warwickshire, and Sir Walter Scott’s ‘ Waverley’ novel of the same title, at the heart of which is Queen Elizabeth I’s famous visit, as the preface to the score elaborates:

In 1575 Queen Elizabeth paid her celebrated visit to Kenilworth Castle, given by her some years before to Dudley, Earl of Leicester. At the Gate of the Gallery Tower, the Queen, mounted on a milk white horse, was greeted with a flourish of trumpets, and presented with the keys of the Castle. Immediately on entering the Tilt Yard, the Spirit of the Lake appeared on a floating island, blazing with torches, and welcomed her. The Queen stayed during nineteen days of lively pastimes, plays, masques and pageantry. The great clock stood the whole time at the hour of dining.

In its pageantry, Kenilworth points to Bliss, the future Master of the Queen’s Music. The work’s dedicatee was Kenneth A. Wright, whom he knew through the BBC music department, and who was an established composer of works for brass band. Kenilworth was first performed on 26 September 1936, Bliss conducting, in the competition’s final concert, at the Crystal Palace, London.

In the first movement, a flurry of upbeat quick-march excitement announces the Queen’s arrival ‘At the Castle Gates’. The tempo slows for the ceremony of the keys, in which quiet solo fanfares pass, in call and answer fashion, between cornet and euphonium, supported by other instrumental colours, such as flugelhorn and soprano cornet. The movement flows attacca into the welcoming ‘Serenade on the Lake’, in which the music, displaying a distinct tinge of melancholy, again exploits the expressive qualities of the cornet and euphonium. Bliss’s joyous concluding March, ‘Kenilworth’, is subtitled ‘Homage to Queen Elizabeth’, its virtuosic writing challenging the players to the full. It is capped by the jubilant return of the music with which the work opened.

Four Dances from ‘Checkmate’

Bliss harboured a life-long love of ballet, stemming from the lasting impressions that the pre-First World War visits of Diaghilev’s Ballets russes made on him while he was studying at the Royal College of Music. Conjuring up memories, he wrote in As I Remember :

These evenings were shot through with unexpected excitements, as the curtain went up on a Bakst design or the opening notes of a Stravinsky score were heard. On a return home from such a feast we seemed to board the bus with a dash of a Nijinsky leap.

The inspiration behind his first full length ballet, Checkmate , arose from another of his favourite pastimes – chess. Bliss described its conception in an article, Death on Squares . In 1923, he was at a dinner party hosted by the dancer Tamara Karsavina, a former member of Diaghilev’s company:

...the discussion turned on the drama of games, and the idea of the pitiless queen in chess leapt from someone’s brain, to become, as it happened, the starting point of the ballet Checkmate .

The image lodged firmly in his mind, but it was not until Ninette de Valois invited him to compose the music for a new ballet which she would choreograph that Bliss suggested the subject to her. With her approval, Bliss created the scenario and, appropriately, dedicated his score to the teacher and composer R.O. Morris, a dedicated chess player whom Bliss often challenged.

With Checkmate , not only did Bliss compose one of his finest scores, but also, combined with de Valois’s choreography and Edward McKnight Kauffer’s designs, a masterwork of British ballet that still holds the stage. Checkmate was first performed on 15 June 1937 at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre des Champs-Ã‰lysÃ©es, Paris, by the Vic-Wells Ballet, the Orchestre des Concerts Lamoureux conducted by Constant Lambert. Eric Ball made his arrangement of Four Dances from Checkmate in 1978 as the Test Piece for that year’s National Brass Band Championships.

In Checkmate , the game is ostensibly played between Love and Death, but the ballet caught the Zeitgeist and the dangers wrought by the grim, growing menace of Nazi Germany; indeed, de Valois’s choreography was influenced by contemporary newsreels of goose-stepping troops. After the pawns have assembled, t he ‘Dance of the Four Knights’ commences: two Red Knights whom Bliss described as ‘fierce and powerful fighters’ leap onto the chess board to an accented theme. They are followed by two reconnoitring Black Knights. To bounding martial rhythms, they challenge one another to displays of prowess, in which the first Red Knight outshines them all.

However, on the entry of the Black Queen, ‘the most dangerous piece on the board’, the Red Knight, dazzled by her allure, is ensnared by her guile. He supposes that he has won her love, and ‘The Red Knight’s Mazurka’ is an elated, testosterone-fuelled athletic dance – although near its conclusion the dance undergoes a sinister change of mood, which presages the fatal consequences of his misguided judgement.

In the ‘Ceremony of the Red Bishops’, the Red Knights are blessed, before the battle to come, with a chant-like theme punctuated by a tolling bell. At the height of the ensuing mÃªlÃ©e, in a moment of indecision on his part, the Red Knight is killed by the Black Queen. In the Finale, ‘Checkmate’, the Black forces harry the Red King, old and helpless, to relentless violent music. Having no means of escape, he is forced back to his throne; but suddenly, as Bliss vividly conveys in the music’s gear-change, he recalls his younger self as a courageous strong sovereign. Momentarily, the Black pieces waver, but behind the Red King the Black Queen stands poised; remorselessly, she plunges her spear into his back – it is Checkmate.

Suite from ‘Adam Zero’

Following Checkmate , Bliss composed another score for the, by then, Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Miracle in the Gorbals , which was choreographed by Robert Helpmann, to a scenario by Michael Benthall. PremiÃ¨red in 1944, the ballet made a considerable impact and was a box office success. It was followed in turn by a further collaboration with Helpmann and Benthall, Adam Zero . This would serve Helpmann, in the eponymous role, as a vehicle in two respects: demonstrating his gifts as a dancer-actor and as choreographer. First performed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 8 April 1946, Adam Zero was conducted by Constant Lambert, the work’s dedicatee. Bliss considered it ‘his most varied and exciting ballet score’. Benthall provided a synopsis for the programme:

There is a philosophy that life moves in an endless series of timeless cycles. As Nature passes through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, so man is born, makes a success in his own particular sphere, loses his position to a younger generation, sees his world crumble before his eyes and only finds peace in death. This age-old story is told in terms of a Company creating a ballet and calling on the resources of the theatre to do so. Lighting, stage mechanism, dance conventions, musical forms and costumes and scenery of all periods are used to symbolize the world of ‘Adam Zero’.

Apart from Adam, as the Principal Dancer, other main roles included the Stage Director (representing Omnipotence), and Adam’s Fates (Designer, Wardrobe Mistress, and Dresser). ‘The Woman in this allegory’, wrote Bliss,

under the symbol of the Choreographer, was both the creator and destroyer of Adam: his first love, his wife, his mistress, and finally the figure of beneficent Death.

When the curtain rose, the

audience saw the Covent Garden stage right back to the wall, completely empty except for the protagonists,

the Company poised, still and expectant, as they await the birth of... Adam Zero.

Unfortunately, soon after the premiÃ¨re, Helpmann injured himself and had to withdraw from the remaining performances. Despite generally positive reviews, the ballet did not capture the imagination of audiences and, to Bliss’s considerable disappointment, was not revived. Seventy years would elapse before its first major return to the stage, in 2016, performed by the ballet company of Stadttheater Bremerhaven with choreography by Sergei Vanaev.

Bliss extracted a concert suite from the ballet, conducting its first performance with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on 28 October 1948. For his own suite, arranged for brass band in 2023, Dr Robert Childs chose three dances linked to the seasons, book-ending them with the ebullient ‘Fanfare Overture’ and ‘Fanfare Coda’. After Adam has grown to manhood, his Fates clothe him in a costume synonymous with confident youth, appropriate for the virile, ardent ‘Dance of Spring’. In the ‘Approach of Autumn’, Adam, now wearing a sombre costume, has grown older: his Fates have streaked grey in his hair and put lines on his face. But they had earlier raised Adam to the zenith of his power, and the ‘Dance of Summer’ depicts him in the prime of life, in music of sweeping grandeur. The ‘Fanfare Coda’ signals that the next cycle of life is about to begin.

Welcome the Queen

Following the death of Sir Arnold Bax, Bliss was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music, on 17 November 1953 (although he preferred to use the older spelling, ‘Musick’) . From the outset he determined, as his friend George Dannatt wrote, ‘to make something new and memorable of that office’. In taking up the role, Bliss was conscious of his place in a tradition of ceremonial music that stretched back to the seventeenth century, and earlier, aware that great national events – a coronation, a royal wedding, the investiture of a Prince of Wales – become part of a nation’s history, and that the music he might compose to celebrate such occasions would become part of the historical heritage.

In response to one of his first assignments in the new post, Bliss composed the March Welcome the Queen for an Associated British PathÃ© film marking the safe return, in May 1954, of H.M. Queen Elizabeth II and H.R.H. Prince Philip after their extensive tour of Commonwealth countries. Heard at the end of the film (the rest of the music was written by Malcolm Arnold), the March is an example of Bliss’s facility for composing such occasional music quickly. Having seen only the first rushes, he knew exactly what he wanted, the march’s main theme taking shape immediately in his mind; in the film, the slower central section of the March sets words by John Pudney. The music was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Muir Mathieson, and the film was first screened, at the National Film Theatre, on 20 May 1954. It was also Mathieson who conducted the premiÃ¨re of the version of the March that Bliss adapted for concert performances; this took place with the BBC Concert Orchestra and the London Light Orchestra, on 17 June the same year. The march is heard here in an arrangement for brass band made by Michael Halstenson in 2023.

The Belmont Variations

Bliss’s second commission for the National Brass Band Championships was The Belmont Variations , composed in 1962 as the 1963 Test Piece, and premiÃ¨red on 19 October that year, by the competing finalists, at the Royal Albert Hall. Bliss turned to Frank Wright, an eminent figure in the post-Second World War brass band movement, asking him to score the work. The expertise of Wright as an arranger had been acknowledged by Bliss’s friend Herbert Howells in the programme for the 1960 finals of the championships,

His brilliance as an arranger of my own and other works is widely known.

The ‘Belmont’ of the work’s title refers to the town in Massachusetts where Bliss’s wife was born, and in an article in The Musical Times , Stephen Arthur Allen advances a compelling argument that the work recalls the state of mind that Bliss experienced when he found himself stranded in the USA, in 1939, at the outbreak of World War II. After the premiÃ¨re of the Piano Concerto, in New York in June 1939, the composer and his family remained for an extended holiday, and found themselves still in that country when war was declared between Great Britain and Germany, in September. It was an unsettling time for the composer, torn between serving his country by returning home, and leaving his beloved family. Bliss sought advice from the conductor Sir Adrian Boult, as to what practical use he might be in England: Boult urged him to remain in the States for the time being. Consequently, the family moved to Belmont, staying for several months until Bliss took up a temporary teaching post, at the University of California.

During his period living in Belmont, Bliss was

haunted by the thought of what our absent friends in England were enduring and wondering what was the right thing for me to do.

In Professor Allen’s cogent view, his memories of those months flooded back to Bliss while he was composing The Belmont Variations and account for the darkness that at times intrudes. After four bars of brooding introduction, played by the trombones, the elegiac Theme is announced by means of melodic lines led by cornet and euphonium respectively. The first variation flows in a pastoral-like lilting rhythm, whereas the second is playful, fast quaver movement and hocket-like call and answer colouring the discourse among the instruments. The third variation features the euphonium in a lyrical solo against distinctly bluesy harmonies.

Variation IV is a wistful waltz in which the cornet is to the fore; it is interrupted by cadenzas for cornet, euphonium, and trombone. After a further hint of the waltz, the variation ends tenderly. The fifth variation is energetic; and, in arguably the most innovative aspect of the work, Variation VI comprises a trio for the trombones, a quartet for flugel horn, solo and first horn, and euphonium, and a final tutti . Bliss rounds off the work with a spirited and stately polonaise, thematically related to the introductory bars.

Music from ‘The Royal Palaces’

Throughout his career, Bliss lavished care on the occasional music he wrote, which is why it is invariably so successful. This is exemplified by his music for the joint ITV / BBC film The Royal Palaces of Britain , for, given the subject of the documentary, as Master of the Queen’s Music Bliss was the natural choice of the producer and director Anthony de LotbiniÃ¨re. Narrated by Kenneth Clark, the film was first televised on Christmas Day 1966, the music having been recorded by the Sinfonia of London, conducted by Muir Mathieson. LotbiniÃ¨re was full of admiration for Bliss’s efforts, writing to thank him:

This is just to tell you how absolutely delighted I am with your music. I spent all day yesterday in a kind of trance, not really believing my ears – as each new piece came up it was exactly what I had hoped for, only far better than I had begun to imagine. Do please accept my most heartfelt thanks for all the care and trouble you went to for this programme.

Michael Halstenson made his arrangement of the suite for brass band in 2023. Vivid in their variety, the movements open with ‘Queen Victoria’s Call to the Throne’, which in a regal march portrays her summons to duty. ‘The Ballroom in Buckingham Palace’ is an infectious waltz, an earworm of a tune that lodges long in the memory, while the fanfares that open the ‘Joust of the Knights in Armour’ recall the ceremony of the keys in Kenilworth , before giving way to the drama of the tilts. The Melodrama ‘The Murder of Rizzio in Holyrood House’ is an example of the agitated, nightmarish passages, redolent with dissonance and unease, that from time to time seemingly well up from nowhere in Bliss’s music. The suite concludes with the verve and nobility of ‘The Royal Palace Theme’. As much as his major works, this short suite bears witness to a composer who throughout his career showed himself a true ‘master’, in every sense of the word.