Bliss CHECKMATE by ScoresOnDemand

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Bliss, Arthur Checkmate

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To R.O. Morris

CHECKMATE A Ballet in One Scene with a Prologue

ARTHUR BLISS

STUDY SCORE

NOVELLO

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Publication of the study score of this new edition of Arthur Bliss’s Checkmate has been made possible with generous support from the Bliss Trust

NOV 078958 ISBN 978-1-847720-24-5 New music pages set by New Notations (London) This edition © 2007 Novello & Company Limited Published in Great Britain by Novello Publishing Limited Part of the Music Sales Group Head Office: 14/15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ Tel Fax

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Preface Checkmate, composed during 1936-7, is arguably Bliss’s most enduring work, not simply in the quality of the music, but also because when combined with Ninette de Valois’s outstanding, inventive choreography and E. McKnight Kauffer’s striking set and costumes, it stood out as a master piece of British dance. Indeed, it has never left the repertoire of the Vic-Wells and subsequently the Royal Ballet companies. Its subject also chimed uncannily with the mood of the times, when the storm clouds of war seemed to be billowing ever nearer, audiences noting the deliberate parallels with the contemporary European situation.

Both de Valois and McKnight Kauffer confessed to knowing nothing about chess, so Bliss demonstrated the characteristic moves of the pieces to them and he recalled that, as he played over the music to de Valois, ‘a large chessboard sat on a table near by and she used to sit as if turned to stone, a frozen image of concentration’. Her choreography combined classical steps, English dance such as the Morris tradition, as well as sinister Nazi goose-steps. The ballet was dedicated to the teacher and composer R.O. Morris, a dedicated chess enthusiast whom Bliss often challenged to a game.

Bliss was in his forties when he composed Checkmate, a golden decade for him when one fine work followed another. The work brought together two of his favourite enthusiasms, chess and ballet; the former dated back to his childhood, while the latter was sparked by performances of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the years immediately before the Great War.

The première on 15 June 1937 at the Théâtre des ChampsElysées was a glittering occasion, danced by a cast with now legendary names including Frederick Ashton (Death), Robert Helpmann (Red King), June Brae (Black Queen), Harold Turner (Red Knight) and Margot Fonteyn leading the Black Pawns. Constant Lambert conducted l’Orchestre des Concerts Lamoureux. The British première took place on 5 October the same year at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London.

As Bliss explained in a 1938 article Death on Squares, the seeds for the ballet were sown at a dinner party during the nineteen-twenties hosted by Tamara Karsavina. The conversation turned to subjects suitable for ballet; games were mentioned, and ‘the idea of the pitiless queen in chess leapt from someone’s brain’. Suggestions for further characters were teased out: someone proposed that the king should be cast as ‘an enfeebled old man’, and Bliss himself had the idea of one of the enemy knights being a ‘worthy opponent’ of the queen. Nothing came of the concept at the time, but when Bliss was asked to write a ballet for the first visit of the Vic-Wells Ballet Company to Paris in 1937, he returned to this dormant idea. Bliss conceived his own scenario, but was greatly helped by the theatre director W. Bridges Adams. During its composition, Bliss became absorbed in the subject of chess and spent hours in the Reading Room of the British Museum studying its history. He was also guided, Bliss recalled, by one ‘pregnant utterance’ of Bridges Adams: ‘this must not be so much a divertissement on chess, as the game itself. To make an audience grasp that, you must start from reality and then venture into fantasy’. Consequently Bliss decided that the red pieces should all be introduced in turn in the first section of the main part of the ballet.

Bliss’s music superbly captures the characters of the chess pieces as well as the drama of the game itself. There are the red pawns, ‘light hearted pages’, Bliss described them, whose carefree theme is the music of novices, evoking their youthful ardour. Then there is the inhuman mechanist marching of the castles emphasising their brutish nature, the ecclesiastical chant of the Bishops, and the pitiful, poignant music of the feeble, elderly Red King. His defender, the Red Knight is portrayed in an athletic mazurka, but most notable of all is the music for his enemy, the Black Queen, the ‘most dangerous piece on the board’. On her first appearance she is characterised by a sensuous clarinet melody indicative of both her sexual allure and her deadly, cold-hearted nature. Later, after she has killed the Red Knight, and with the Red King now at her mercy, she taunts him in a steely, coldblooded tango. The finale is pure theatre as, to ferocious music, the black forces hound their quarry, forcing the King back to his throne. Briefly, as he rediscovers his youthful self, he defies them to heroic thundering percussion. But behind him stands the Black Queen spear aloft; as she plunges it into his back the death blows in the music are unmistakable; it is Checkmate.

Andrew Burn

Checkmate recording Naxos 8.557641 Royal National Scottish Symphony Orchestra, David Lloyd Jones

Bliss - Checkmate (Prelims only).qxp

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