Arthur Bliss thought Bliss's music competent but unremarkable. In 1961, Bliss and Hassall collaborated on a cantata, "The Beatitudes", commissioned for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral. Reviews were friendly, but the work has rarely been performed since, and has been eclipsed by another choral work written for Coventry at the same time, Britten's "War Requiem". Bliss followed this with two further large-scale choral works, "Mary of Magdala" (1962) and "The Golden Cantata" (1963). Throughout his life, Bliss was vigilant on the state of music in Britain, about which he had written extensively since the 1920s. In 1969 he publicly censured
Osburh of Coventry Osburh of Coventry Osburh (or Osburga) was an Anglo-Saxon saint who rested at Coventry Cathedral. Although there is some tradition holding her to be an early 11th-century abbess of Coventry Abbey, it is suspected that her cult predates the Viking Age. A 14th-century note in MS Bodley 438 mentions an early nunnery at Coventry. The 15th-century writer John Rous related that Cnut the Great destroyed the old Coventry minster, and noted that the "holy virgin Osburga now laid there in a noble shrine" (probably lay in the south transept of the church). As the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" records the devastation of