ABSTRACT
Christopher Vernon Hassall was the son of Constance and John Hassall. By 1934, in his early twenties, Hassall was already displaying that skill of fitting words adroitly to music which Arthur Bliss later admired so intensely. When precisely in the 1950s Arthur Bliss and Christopher Hassall first met is not clear, though both were at various times stalwarts of the Performing Right Society (PRS). Hassall served as board director from 1952; Bliss was the PRS’s President from 1954 to his death in 1975, and the pair would often repair to Bliss’s home for drinks or dinner and lively conversation. Bliss’s collaboration with Christopher Hassall was on the television opera Tobias and the Angel. The pair corresponded extensively during the opera’s formative period. By April 1959, when Bliss and Hassall were well advanced on the Tobias and the Angel project, Bliss is referring in his letters to ‘the work for Coventry Cathedral’.
