New Bliss publications of songs and chamber music
Boosey and Hawkes has released three new Arthur Bliss publications in collaboration with The Bliss Trust. An early violin sonata movement and a collection of seven songs are joined by an album assembling four piano works including Valses Fantastiques, returned to the catalogue a century after its composition.
Three new publications offer music largely from Arthur Bliss’s early years before or immediately after the First World War, prepared in collaboration with The Bliss Trust to mark the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death in 2025. His first-hand experiences as a soldier in the war and his suffering over the resulting human losses represented a personal watershed for the composer. Many of his earlier works were withdrawn as he attempted to draw a line and rebuild a new post-war musical style and career as a composer in the 1920s.
These new publications are intended by The Bliss Trust to offer not only renewed access to the music but also insights into the composer’s early development and subsequent emergence as a significant 20th century British composer. The score prefaces draw on notes by Giles Easterbrook, an unswerving advocate of Bliss's music, investigating the background to each work's composition.
Sonata for Piano and Violin (1916)
Edited by Rupert Marshall-Luck
979-0-060-15249-8 Violin part and piano score
This sonata movement, dedicated to violinist Lady Alice Elgar, was composed during a period of wartime convalescence when Bliss was recovering from wounds received on the Somme before returning to the front. With a duration of 11 minutes the movement offers a substantial sonata opening but no further movements were to follow after the war. It was uncatalogued by the composer, yet the manuscript was kept by him for almost 60 years, demonstrating his continuing affection for the music. The preface by Giles Easterbrook explores the background to the work's composition, including the relevance of Bliss's military service and the death of his brother in action, and his connection with other significant composers of the time, Elgar and Howells.
As well as this first publication of the sonata movement, edited by Rupert Marshall-Luck, the original urtext version is available for download: 979-0-060-15250-4. A recording can be heard with Rupert Marshall-Luck as violinist with Matthew Rickard as pianist: EMR CD001.
Two American Poems (1940) and other songs
for voice and piano
979-0-060-14226-0 Vocal album
The Two American Poems were offcuts from Bliss’s Seven American Poems, composed during the Second World War when he held a professorship at the University of Berkeley. Setting texts by Edna St Vincent Millay, the two songs were too strongly individual to sit comfortably within the set of seven songs and could only be performed by a female voice, whereas the final selection could be sung by either gender. The other five songs in this new publication are early works, composed in the period from 1910 up to the mid-1920s. Featured poets include Tennyson, Walter de la Mare and A E Housman, with three songs appearing here that remained unpublished during the composer’s lifetime.
Valses Fantastiques (1913 ) and other early works for piano
for piano
979-0-060-14225-3 Piano album
The music in this new keyboard publication all dates from Bliss’s university years in Cambridge (1910-13) and the disappearance of these pieces was due to the composer’s purge of his early ‘unrepresentative’ works written before and during the First World War. Valses Fantastiques is the final work in a sequence of waltz-themed piano music penned by the student composer, perhaps inspired by Ravel’s example. As Giles Easterbrook notes, this set of four waltzes “is a rewardingly playable, elegantly charming blend of the wistful with the gently romantic”. The Suite is a substantial 16-minute sequence of Prelude-Ballade-Scherzo, while the Intermezzo was intended originally as the Suite’s middle movement before being replaced by the Ballade. The album is completed with May-Zeeh, a salon-style piece dedicated to a mystery romantic partner, which was the first music by Bliss to be published in his lifetime.
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