Beatitudes

Following demobilization from the army in 1919, Bliss wrote four exploratory essays in sonority and textures, including Madam Noy and Rout. They accorded him a short-lived reputation as an enfant terrible, but they can also be said to have paved the way for his first large-scale orchestral work, the Color Symphony. The "witchery song" Madam Noy (1918) is a bizarre variation on the old nursery rhyme "Old Mother Hubbard." Rout is used in the old sense of popular revelry, and is a vibrant score evoking the snatches of song that might be caught by someone watching a carnival. For the rarely encountered scena for contralto and orchestra, The Enchantress, the text was supplied by Bliss's poet friend Henry Reed. And finally, Bliss was Master of the Queen's Musick when he was commissioned to write The Beatitudes for the Festival of 1962 to mark the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral.