Arthur Bliss (1891 -1975)
Two Studies
Music for Strings
Concerto for Cello and Orchestra
Within months of the end of the Great War, Arthur Bliss
exploded onto a music scene that for something like sixty years he successively
outraged, intrigued, transformed, enriched, guided and graced. A striking
series of 'experiments in sound' divided the critics and gripped the public, a
period recalled by that great Bliss enthusiast Benjamin Brit ten in a letter to
the senior composer on his 75th birthday:
My dear Arthur,
When one is very young, tales of one elder's youthful
exploits set one's sympathy vibrating strongly... In my boyhood you, Arthur, were
the avant gardist of Rout, Conversations and daring, possibly apocryphal
Parisian exploits. You were almost a myth. ...For me still, the zestful avant gardist
peeps out of the silvery halo of to-day. Happy you who can preserve youthful
exuberance without youthful immaturity!
On this compact disc we can enjoy works from both periods,
that of experiment and silvery halo'd youthful maturity, together with a
quintessential masterpiece from the height of his commanding powers.
Few things that are not bad for my health or morals give
me more pleasure than to see the Two Studies, his very first orchestral
composition, recorded. Not only are they a delight which throws light on an
exciting period of Bliss's work, but a delight many of us never expected to
enjoy.
Bliss was discharged from the army in February 1919, having endured a war in
which he was wounded, gassed, earned recommendations for gallantry decorations,
witnessed inconceivable slaughter and atrocities, saw many friends slain and
lost a brother with whom he had been extremely close. He was then 28, naturally
a late developer, with his youth poisoned, his family shattered, and with a
harrowingly acquired, spurious maturity. He did what many another artist did to
preserve his sanity: he went on a kind of binge, cramming his days with travel,
lecturing, conducting, performing, reviewing and composing a succession of ground-breaking
scores. He forged a highly personal style, while encountering the best European
composers on level terms and establishing a British equivalent.
Amongst the catalogue of idiosyncratic, rather subversive
works are these Studies, written at some speed to meet a deadline for
submissions to the Royal College of Music's 'Patrons' Fund Concerts' - semi-public
open rehearsal/performances, and one of the few openings for orchestral works
by new composers. Bliss conducted the first performance on 17th February, 1921. They were heard perhaps twice more before disappearing from sight for over half a
century. Stylistically, Bliss was then the outsider, with neither sympathy nor
sense of belonging as regards any of the current British musical schools. It was
to the continent that he looked, and to France that he went, to perform, in
November 1919. The composer Josef Holbrooke had masterminded a trip to Paris
where both composer-pianists were to play their respective Piano Quintets
at a pair of concerts. The enterprise degenerated into a combination of farce
and debacle (nothing apocryphal about that exploit), but a
concert of sorts eventually was given, where Bliss met Milhaud and established
an immediate rapport. He also lunched with Ravel, whom he revered. He returned
to London with his head buzzing, and the stimulus of Les Six and the vibrant Paris
arts scene must have resonated in his mind as he worked on this score.
The first study, Adagio ma non troppo is a
beautifully poised, cool pastoral, at the same time lyrically touching but
unsentimental. For a first orchestral work the craftsmanship is astonishing:
deft, assured and restrained, the atmospheres precisely imagined and conveyed.
Melodies unfold effortlessly, the invention is fecund, the harmonies logical but
piquant. The climax is perfectly placed -his timing was spot-on from the outset
and never left him - the colours clear, limpid but subdued, like a Corot
landscape that has stood perhaps overlong in the sun; poignant, evocative and
under control. If some scholar discovered it to be a lost sketch from Ravel's Mother
Goose, say, few would argue, though it has more an echo of his Rhapsody
(1919). In the second, we are more in the areas of Rout. It is a brief,
spirited, genial lampoon, putting its thumb to its nose as it romps through a
modest catalogue of new-music targets: the Chinoiserie pentatonic tune, the coarse
percussion outburst, the vulgar trombone whoop, but done with the humour of indulgence
- he had a sneaking fondness for such things himself.
During the 1920s, Bliss took the manuscript back,
presumably to make revisions.
Other matters must have pressed, however, and so
comprehensively did he forget he had it that when his publisher's warehouse was
destroyed by a bomb in World War II, he was convinced the Studies had
gone with it. It was only after his death that the manuscript surfaced from his
papers, where it had lain all the time. The Piano Quintet was less fortunate.
With one mystery solved, another appears, the title-page
reading Studies for full Orchestra Nos. 2 & 3. If there was, or was
to have been, a 'No.1' we can only speculate. My guess is that it was written,
and withdrawn as a result of Bliss's session with Holst their conversation as
reported in Arthur's autobiography is clearly about a work that is neither of
the surviving pieces. It would have had to be an Allegro moderato, more
dramatic than the existing first study, less flippant than the second and
longer than either, and it probably ended up recycled into something else.
Strangely enough there is exactly such a work, also dating from 1921. It is
called Melee Fantasque.
In the years leading up to Music for Strings Bliss
covered an enormous distance stylistically, emotionally, intellectually - and
geographically. Gone is the disarming innocence of the Studies, blown
away by his experiences working with the crack American orchestras, replaced by
a sophisticated, bravura flair, though with no loss of freshness. The source of
its greatness lies deeper than that, in more spiritual realms: Bliss, the trai11ed,
convinced classicist, valuing structure and proportion above gesture and
rhetoric, competing with Bliss the theatre-lover, the romantic, fond of
dramatic statement and direct expression. You will find few more successful products
of such confrontation of classic and romantic, of passion amplified by
discipline. Initially he conceived it as an essay into pure, absolute music,
and when commentators described it as an overtly romantic work, he did not
quite know whether to take it as a compliment or not. There was also growing in
him the realisation that when you are trying to say something new, not only do
you not really need an experimental language, it can actually get in the way. He
had learned what he wanted from experiment, and walked away from it with a
smile. His war memories he could not walk away from.
His path lay in the sunshine, but his glance turned ever
towards the shadows.
Nightmares recurred and the ghosts would not quite depart
- work-therapy was only partly effective and for all the joyous, life-affirming
pieces there was always a feeling of a job left undone. Attempts to grapple
with this pepper his catalogue, a set of (never completed) Battle
Variations for orchestra, the Suite for piano and Hymn to Apollo
dealing either overtly or obliquely with the problem. Resolution, as he
supposed, came most powerfully in the great choral symphony Morning Heroes
and most poignantly and privately with the sublime Clarinet Quintet. For
many months thereafter he wrote little that was not small-scale for small
ensembles, as if he were re-grouping his forces for some great thrust. This
thrust, when it came, was impressive - two, simultaneously composed, of his
most characteristic, commanding, outstanding works: Things to Come and Music
for Strings. Their feeling of release, of liberatedness, is overwhelming.
Music for Strings was commissioned for the 1935
Salzburg Festival, at which distinctly romantic setting Adrian Boult conducted
the Vienna Philharmonic at the first performance on 11th August. London heard
it, appropriately, on Fireworks Night (5th November) the same year. It is
arguably Bliss's finest work, as is Elgar's Introduction and Allegro
his, and the choice of medium - massed strings - may have been influenced by
his starting work on it only weeks after the death of Elgar, a composer with
whom he had a long, close, sometimes stormy but essentially cordial
relationship, professionally and as a friend. The works themselves have more
than a passing similarity of spirit and shape, though this should not be
overstated. The opening, Allegro moderato, energico (with the emphasis
on the 'energico') immediately sets the mood: flamboyant virtuoso in an
extended sonata-form, a thing of swaggering themes interrupted by heavy chords,
propelled through several keys by a vigorous bass-line underpinning supple,
extensively subdivided part-writing to produce a rich, saturated sound and
sharply etched lines. The progressive tonality has a fierce logic that permits
numerous little asides and discursions without damaging the structural line. He
is in total control of highly elaborate material. A quintet of soloists introduces
a bridge passage joining this movement to the next, Andante, molto
sostenuto, which the ever modest composer dismisses
with the single word 'rhapsodic'. Rhapsodic it certainly is, but never merely
pastoral or predictable. It is mostly in compound time; nine, twelve, fifteen,
even eighteen quavers to the bar keeping the theme moving, as it is transformed
with infinite resource and subtlety and separated by episodes.
Astonishingly, the last movement manages to outdo the
first in its bravura of both structural organisation and expressive force. An
elaborate introduction of varied speeds and metres presents the material which
develops throughout, the movement being made up of several sections, distinct in
mood and treatment, thematically closely related, giving the benefits of
sonata, variation and metamorphosis techniques. Like the opening movement, the
climax is marked by a pedal-point, but here followed by passages of ever increasing
tempo, maintaining tension and heightening excitement through the final presto,
and an emphatic, peremptory two-bar coda of the movement's opening figure – a masterstroke
to leave the listener breathless, to say nothing of the performers.
As with the Studies, but for different reasons, we
are lucky to have the Cello Concerto, which belongs to a late group of
works that Bliss never intended writing. When he drew the double bar line to The
Golden Cantata (1963) he intended it as much to his whole career as to a single
piece. "1 find my ability to concentrate is now less," he wrote,
"my joy in writing music on the wane", and for the next five or so
years he wrote nothing but personal miniatures and 'official pieces' in his
capacity as Master of the Queen's Music. Creative fires are not so easily
quelled though, and a niggling fascination with the poetry of Kathleen Raine,
whom he had set in the cantata, coaxed him back to the score-paper to produce,
unprompted, a major song-cycle (Angels of the Mind) in 1969. The damage
was done of course, and he could no longer pretend to have stopped composing
when requests arrived through his letter-box. He could, on the other hand,
choose very carefully what he did write. Two such commissions came from the Aldeburgh
Festival, a cantata for chorus, brass and organ, and the Cello Concerto,
officially - and genuinely - from Rostropovich, but stage-managed by Britten,
who conducted the first performance at the festival in June 1970.
Bliss wrote four concertos (that survive to us) at a rate
of about one every fifteen years, give or take the odd month, and they are all
absolutely touchstones of his work at every stage of his composing life.
Surprisingly maybe, the two at the extremes of his career have more in common
with each other that with the massive concerti for piano and for violin whose
sweep and grandeur of vision would have been i11imical to their succinct
elegance. The first, for two pianos, might easily have been called
'Concertino', while this piece actually was, and billed as such at the first
performance. It may seem odd that a twenty- five minute work of taxing
technical demands should be given this diminutive, self-effaci11g title, and
both conductor and soloist/ dedicatee prevailed on Bliss to re-name it, but you
can see exactly what he meant. It is not about confrontation, making grand gestures
or pitting ideas or textures against each other, and its spirit is indeed one
of lightness, which does not mean triviality. Ideas work with, not against,
each other. While often forthright, it is intimate and conversational, seldom
raising its voice; it celebrates being alive and tells of gentle sunlight and
dappled shade. Britten will have recognized the "youthful vigour without
youthful immaturity" when he conducted it, the classical balance and
design, with the force generated by authentic thematic working and structure, which
is compatible with restraint. The scoring is economical and resourceful, dapper
almost, the movements cross-referenced and through-composed with stealth and
subtlety.
Bliss was quite open about his need for a specific
stimulus to arouse his creative powers, in the case of a concerto a specific
player and, for all Rostropovich's involvement with the commission, one is
bound to wonder if it did not stir other memories, of a distant, happy time
before the Great War, and a more remote soloist. Might the real spur for this work
have been his brother Howard, a distinguished cellist in his own right with recordings
to his name in the 78 rpm era, and with whom Arthur had long ago played the great
recital works of the repertoire? Perhaps not, but I do wonder... The reflectiveness
behind the high-spirited sections, the warmth in the wistfulness, seem to tell
us something...
Enough of this: there are three movements, as befits a
classical concerto, of which the first, by far the most extended, is based on
robust, expansive material, leaping intervals and dotted, characteristic Bliss
rhythms which, in various states of development, permeate the whole work. The
second is tender, perhaps slightly sad, an interplay of muted tones and little
private dialogues between soloist and wind instruments, sometimes horns. It is mostly
in compound time and triplets, and would be a lullaby except that it will not
settle. The third is a coming-together of disparates, mostly athletic or
puckish, with almost a cabaret of rapid mood and metre changes and a
contrasting sostenuto section that genuinely touches the heart, albeit
gently - lyrical but not sentimental - before the very opening theme bursts
back upon us and a Vivo coda precipitates us to the conclusion The
"joy in writing" shines out of almost every bar.
On the face of it, the Concerto does almost everything
soloists hate: they play a strenuously demanding part calling for the uttermost
of technique and finesse, offering very little opportunity for display but
affording every chance to make mistakes. They do this for a long time, with
scarcely a bar's rest, and for the most part severely exposed. There are
pitfalls galore, no hiding places and very little glory. And yet, not one
player have I met with a bad word to say about it.
@ 1996 Giles Easterbrook