Introduction

There is a remarkable Wyndham Lewis portrait of Arthur Bliss as a young man in which the artist exaggerated the oval shape of the composer’s head. Bliss himself compared this portrait with an El Greco but it lacks completely the haggard looks of so many El Grecos. The death of his brother Kennard in the trenches left a scar for life. It also left Arthur with an extraordinary feeling for the instrument that his brother played, the clarinet. The first piece that shows this feeling is the Pastoral for that instrument with piano, which is thought to have been written in 1916, around the time of the soldier’s death, a piece published posthumously but one full of feeling for the instrument, containing shapes and harmonies typical of the much later Bliss. Sir Arthur has said that he often needed a trouvaille, sometimes a kick-start, to get him going.