It is said that everyone who was alive at the time can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of John F Kennedy’s assassination. I certainly can. I was in the front room of our house in south London practising for my grade 3 piano exam in a few days’ time. It was rather a nice piece of Hindemith, which I hugely enjoyed playing, and I was annoyed when my further came into the room – piano practice times were sacrosanct in our house – and told me to stop because President Kennedy had been shot. I remember asking my father why it mattered so much to him since he never seemed to like Americans. “This one was different”, he told me. I didn’t go to see the television in the other room, as Dad had suggested, but stayed where I was wondering why the death of an American President was more important than practising for my grade 3. It was many years before I appreciated the horror my father and others must have felt and why this particular death has become so ingrained in our consciousness; for years the world had been teetering on the brink of nuclear annihilation and it was widely felt that with Kennedy’s death the Russian threat was all the more real to all of us. History may have taught us that this was not the case, but I realise what a catastrophe Kennedy’s assassination must have seemed at the time.
Other deaths have had a more personal resonance, but there is one other death of a non-family member which I remember so vividly that I can give an almost exact account of the moment in time when I heard news of it.
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Sir Arthur Bliss - a Nice Composer |
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In his youth Bliss could easily have passed as a film star |
Someone had been contacted to assess Bliss’s life. I don’t know who it was but as I write this I heard
the voice of Michael Tippett; and I’m sure it couldn’t have been him. Whoever it was stressed how “nice”, “charming” and what a “consummate gentleman” Bliss had been. I had met Bliss at a concert performance of his opera The Olympians some time earlier, and the news of his death struck home. I determined to get to know his music better; apart from The Olympians (not a note of which I remembered then or now) all I knew was the March from Things to Come and the Colour Symphony which we had played in the school orchestra. Another voice on the radio declared his greatest work to have been Morning Heroes, and when we eventually arrived in Scotland and took a day shopping in Edinburgh, I went straight to the record shop which sat proudly then in Princes Street (it may even have been a branch of the then reputable HMV) and picked up a recently-released LP of it.

So touched was I by the references to Bliss as “nice” that I determined to dig deep into his output. I started my MA course analysing his Music for Strings and discovered a range of works including a Piano Concerto and a choral Pastorale but somehow Bliss never did again what he did in Morning Heroes and, nice as he was, he does not go down in history as one of the great British composers of the 20th century.
Nice composers rarely do earn a place in history. Look at the big names we all know; Bach,Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler. Every one of them a thoroughly nasty piece of work, most of whom one would hope never to meet alone in a dark alley at night. Haydn seems to have been all right – unless, that is, you look at the disgraceful way he treated his wife, behaviour which is excused by most of his biographers by dismissing his wife as a “simple, dull peasant woman” – and while Bruckner wouldn’t hurt a fly, he certainly was not what you would call a man whose company anyone would have actively sought; and as the father of a pre-teen daughter, I would have done anything to keep him away from my family.
I am always vaguely amused by those who desperately seek out composers and great musicians in order to be photographed with them or collect their autographs; they invariably get disappointed when their great heroes turn out to be utterly unpleasant people.

John Dowland is revered as one of the great figures of English music – yet there is no reason to assume Ms Tremain got it wrong and we can be fairly sure he was a miserable bugger. Arthur Bliss is all but forgotten even by those who are passionate enthusiasts for English music – yet everyone tells us how nice he was. Is that mere coincidence?
Arthur Sullivan was an unsually kind and generous individual, which probably supports your argument!!
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