English composer Arthur Bliss first conceived the idea for his ballet Checkmate at a dinner party in 1922. Among those present was the lead female dancer in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Tamara Karsavina. Bliss recalled she had danced the role of the murderous Queen Thamar in the first Diaghliev ballet he ever saw and that memory and her presence gave him the idea of "the pitiless queens in chess...to become the starting point of the ballet Checkmate." The ballet was composed years later and premiered in 1937 at the Théâtre des Champs Elysees in Paris under the musical direction of Constant Lambert.

Composed in Bliss' lightly rhythmic, intensely colorful and highly dramatic modernist style, the ballet is in six sections: "Prologue—The Players," "Dance of the Four Knights," "Entry of the Black Queen," "The Red Knight's Mazurka," "Ceremony of the Red Bishops," and "Finale—Checkmate." The opening shows the two players, Love and Death playing for the lives of their subjects. The next four sections introduce the various main pieces in the game and are all relatively brief. The Finale depicts the actual game and climaxes with the Black Queen killing the Red King from behind. Checkmate proved a turning point in British ballet and resulted in many more ballet commissions for Bliss.

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