Gustav Holst never considered the orchestral suite The Planets to be his masterpiece, but it is chiefly for this work that the composer is now remembered. Holst nevertheless produced a great deal of work of equal originality, and his importance as a teacher is also considerable.
Holst’s family originally came from Sweden, but he was born, on September 21, 1874, in the English spa town of Cheltenham, where his father was a pianist and organist. In 1893, he went to London to study at the Royal College of Music, where one of his fellow students was Ralph VAUGHAN WILLIAMS. The two formed a close and long-lasting friendship, sharing among other things a love of folk song, of 16th- and 17th-century English music, and of the poetry of Walt Whitman. Both also maintained a keen and active interest in amateur music making.
After his studies at the Royal College, Holst earned his living first by playing the trombone in various orchestras, then by becoming music master at St. Paul’s Girls’ School in London, a position which he held to the end of his life. Holst also taught at evening institutions and in 1907 became musical director at Morley College, a London college for working men and women. His teaching methods were highly unorthodox: he disliked learning by rote, hated textbooks, and believed that music-making should be open to anyone with an enthusiasm.
Holst’s restless and inquiring mind was meanwhile shaping his career as a composer. With Vaughan Williams, he went on walking holidays, collecting English and Welsh folk songs and dances. He spent another holiday in Algeria to discover something of Arabic music and culture, and he learned Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, in order to read and translate from the epic Mahabharata and the Rig Veda. All these diverse interests found their way into Holst’s music. There are celebrations of the English countryside in orchestral pieces such as the folk song-based A Somerset Rhapsody (1906–07), and in choral pieces such as the austere Egdon Heath (1927), inspired by Thomas Hardy’s novel, Return of the Native. The orchestral suite Beni Mora (1910) explores the harmonies of northern Africa, while he set his own translations of Sanskrit verses to music in Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda (1907–08).
It was Holst’s interest in astrology, however, that inspired The Planets (1914–16), the work which marks the full maturing of his style and his emergence as a major composer. Each of the seven movements in this orchestral suite vividly evokes the astrological character of a planet. Holst was already working on The Planets in early 1914, and the relentless rhythms and clashing discords of its opening movement, “Mars, the Bringer of War,” seem to herald World War I. It was “Neptune, the Mystic,” however, that made the greatest impression at the suite’s first performance in 1918—the ethereal harmonies of its closing wordless chorus carry the listener out beyond the planet, into the infinity of space. The suite was an immediate popular success. Soon after, however, Holst turned to a more austere style, typified by the Choral Symphony of 1923–24.
Holst was an original his compositions standing outside any national style or other “school” of music. But the economy and clarity of his writing proved influential on later British composers such as Sir Michael TIPPETT and Benjamin BRITTEN. Holst was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society in 1930. He died in London, on May 25, 1934.
Alan Blackwood
SEE ALSO:
OPERA; ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.
FURTHER READING
Holst, Imogen. Gustav Holst: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988);
Short, Michael. Gustav Holst: The Man and His Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
At the Boar’s Head; A Choral Fantasia; Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda; First Choral Symphony; Hammersmith; Hymn to Dionysus; Hymn to Jesus; A Moorside Suite; The Planets; Suite No. 1; Suite No. 2.