ABSTRACT
Settings of Robert Service are rare amongst the ‘art-song’ composers. Arthur Bliss composed ‘The Tramps’, from Songs of a Sourdough, in October 1916, though it was not published until 1918. In a lecture he delivered to the Society of Women Musicians in July 1921, Bliss commends the economy of chamber instrumentation as against the gargantuan orchestrations of Strauss and Scriabin. Dedicated to Minnie Untermeyer, the Ballads of the Four Seasons are an intimation of Bliss’s power, within the form of the art-song, to unleash emotion in relation to the theme of separation in time of war. Written ‘for Barbara’, Bliss’s elder daughter, born in 1926, ‘A Child’s Prayer’ sets a poem by a survivor of the Great War, Siegfried Sassoon. These are, of course, the words of an adult, wishing them to be prayed by a child. The accompaniment is a simple, mostly three-voiced, texture of even crotchet progressions within the middle range.
