Arthur Bliss on AllMovie

Arthur Bliss only wrote a small handful of film scores, all of them for British films, but he had a profound effect on the shape of film music, as the first major, established composer of the sound era to author an original movie score. Major composers had been involved in film scoring since Camille Saint-Saëns contributed to a movie in 1903, but the coming of sound had killed the dramatic film score for six years, from 1927 until 1933, when Max Steiner's music for King Kong showed what a score could do for a talking picture. Over the next two years, first in America and a bit more slowly in England and the rest of the world, a new generation of composers began emerging who specialized in scoring movies, but established composers from the concert hall were a little more reticent. Enter Arthur Bliss, then one of the leading composers in England. Born in 1891, Bliss was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the Royal College of Music, and went through several radical stylistic changes between 1910 and 1930, initially embracing British post-romanticism, then rejecting it in favor of much more modernistic influences. Following service in the 1914-1918 war, he emerged as a defiantly avant-garde figure, heavily influenced by the French modernists and also a new American-spawned export called jazz. He earned a reputation in the 1920s as a cutting-edge composer, but ironically enough, during this period, he slowly reassessed his work once more and subsequently moved back toward English post-romanticism and a much more dramatic, musically declamatory style of writing, oddly enough somewhat akin to that of Sir Edward Elgar, who had rejected much of Bliss' avant-garde work.

By the mid-'30s, Bliss was thoroughly beloved of the British cultural establishment, balancing innovation and tradition, and it was at that point that movie mogul Alexander Korda approached him. Korda was planning the biggest film production attempted on either side of the Atlantic in at least a decade, an epic about humankind's future to be called Things to Come (aka The Shape of Things to Come). It was to be made on a scale that recalled such silent epics as Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings, and even D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, two decades before. It was being written by renowned science fiction and philosophical author H.G. Wells, and designed and directed by the most renowned art director and production designer in movies, William Cameron Menzies. It also had several of the top stage and film actors of the period -- including Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson, and Cedric Hardwicke -- in the leading roles. Bliss was the final piece in the creative puzzle, and he agreed to write the score, using Wells' screenplay (which was still being written) as a guide. His score, which quickly took on a separate life of its own in the concert hall (partly owing to changes made in the script that Bliss had used in his outline and in the editing of the completed film), turned out to be one of the most enduring elements of the movie, showing an emotional involvement that was lacking in much of the onscreen content, as well as presenting something new to filmgoers. Indeed, no one had ever heard such bold and substantial music in a talking picture, theoretically serving as the underscore but nearly as prominent as the star performances. Most of it was memorable, some of it, such as the march of the airmen and the finale, highly so. (Ironically enough, the airmen's march would be lost as a piece of free-standing music for 70 years, thanks to the chaotic state of the written and published score.)

If Steiner opened a breach that showed producers what a full score in a dramatic movie could do, Bliss' music blasted a hole into the business (especially in England) through which four generations of serious composers poured. From Lambert Williamson in the 1930s through William Alwyn in the 1940s and '50s to Sir Richard Rodney Bennett in the 1960s and '70s, they would find film work a means of achieving financial solvency and also of writing music that would get recorded and heard publicly with reasonable rapidity; conversely, their work on behalf of the movies raised the bar of what constituted a "good" soundtrack in Britain so high that the scoring of even minor British pictures turned into one of their greatest attributes. Within a decade of Things to Come, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Sir Arnold Bax -- England's two greatest symphonists, both musical figures even more exalted than Bliss -- would move into film work, to the delight of producers, directors, and audiences. Between commissions for ballets, choral works, concertos, and other pieces, and a healthy schedule of performances, Bliss was sufficiently established to avoid the necessity of working regularly in movies. He remained prominent for decades, even authoring a piano concerto to commemorate the 1939 New York World's Fair. He resided in the United States in the closing years of the 1930s and the start of the 1940s, and was employed as Director of Music by the BBC during the Second World War. Bliss received a knighthood in 1950 and three years later was made Master of the Queen's Music (the musical equivalent of poet laureate), serving in that post until his death in 1975.

Bliss only wrote five more film scores after Things to Come, one immediately afterward for Korda's documentary Conquest of the Air (1936); then the music for Thorold Dickinson's drama Men of Two Worlds (1946), about an African musician's conflict between his origins and his success in Europe; and next, the score for the Rank Organization's production of Christopher Columbus (1949), starring Fredric March. He followed that with Peter Brook's 1953 adaptation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and Richard Sale's suspense drama Abandon Ship (1957). None of these had anything like the same impact as Things to Come, though Bliss' work on The Beggar's Opera, adapting the 18th-century piece to the dimensions of a modern orchestra, was a skillful (and delightful) updating of the score. He lived long enough to record his suite from the score twice, once in stereo in the second half of the 1950s, and to see his work pass from fashion and begin to get rediscovered. By the early 21st century, there was more of his music available in recorded form than at any time in history, including extensive restorations of his complete films scores, with Things to Come as the centerpiece.