ABSTRACT
Arthur Bliss composed only two operas: The Olympians, to a text by J. B. Priestley, first staged at Covent Garden on 29 September 1949; and Tobias and the Angel, commissioned for BBC Television with a libretto by Christopher Hassall, and first shown on 19 May 1960. Compared with, say, Peter Grimes, first staged to acclaim in the year the two began work on The Olympians, Bliss’s opera never really took off. The Olympians received one of its rare revivals on Monday 21 February 1972, three years before the composer’s death, as a belated contribution to Bliss eightieth birthday celebrations. The trouble with The Olympians was really that it proceeded as if opera had got stuck in 19th century. Most of The Olympians was composed in Bliss’s secluded studio behind the Bliss family home, specially designed by Peter Harland, Pen Pits, near Wincanton, in the picturesque borderland once defended by that other, Celtic, Arthur, where three counties, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, abut.
