Gustav Holst (1874-1934) was born in Cheltenham, England to a family that was rich in musicians – his father was an organist and his mother a piano teacher. Holst was small and sickly as an adolescent, with asthma, severe nearsightedness, and a neuritis of his right hand. This neuritis defeated any plans that Holst had to be a pianist, though he was an able organist. His father, Adolph von Holst, suggested that the young Holst take up the trombone to improve his breathing and breath control. Holst became an established orchestral trombonist which, after finishing his training in composition at the Royal College of Music, became a source of income to allow him to marry his fiancé, whom he met when she was a chorister in the Hammersmith Socialist Choir that he was conducting. Performing as a trombonist in orchestras, according to Holst’s daughter the eminent composer Imogen Holst, gave him valuable experience of learning the orchestra “from the inside out,” resulting in great mastery of orchestration, especially brass writing.
Holst taught with the “Socialist” ideal that art was for everybody and not just for the people lucky enough to be born to parents of means. This was a foundation of Holst’s artistic life and his livelihood. He was determined to be a composer but took up teaching posts at St. Paul’s Girls’ School (1905) and Morley College (1907) [founded in 1889 as “Morley Memorial College for Working Men and Women”] where he was director of music. These posts occupied Holst for decades. While teaching took time that could have been dedicated to composing, there are video interviews of some of Holst’s students from St. Paul’s expressing that he was a beloved teacher (“Gussie”) who was able to obtain high standards of performance through encouragement.
It is enchanting to hear one student describe how Holst would urge the girls to look up from their scores and sing with open mouths, “like a crocodile” (enunciating each syllable as Croc-OH-Dial). Morley College in 1907 had no reputation for musical performance but progressed under Holst’s tutelage to become eminent in music training. (The famous composer Sir Michael Tippett succeeded Holst there.)
While many might think of Holst as a composer of a “One Hit Wonder” namely, The Planets (1914-1916) if any of our patrons have played in a band or a student string orchestra (or listened to their children participate in them), they are almost certain to have performed or heard Holst’s two wildly popular Suites for Band (No. 1 in E flat of 1909 and No.2 in F of 1911) and his St. Paul’s Suite (1913) for strings. The latter was written for his girls at St. Paul’s. It may well be that Holst hit his “sweet spot” with The Planets because in that work there is a happy confluence of Holst’s ability to write attractive functional music with his “serious” side leavening his “remoteness” as described by his student, the composer Edmund Rubbra, as Holst’s essential style.
Holst had a penchant for ideals, philosophies, and cultural trends off the beaten (read “Germanic”) path. Not only did Holst participate in the project of Ralph Vaughn Williams to employ English folk tunes in his works, like the aforementioned Suites, he learned to translate Sanskrit so he could set texts of the Rig Veda -- Hymns from the Rig Veda for solo voice (1908) and 10 Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda (1908-10). His Hymn of Jesus (1917) for double chorus, orchestra, piano, and organ sets texts of the apocryphal Gnostic Acts of St. John. His Ode to Death (1919) for chorus and orchestra composed to commemorate dead countrymen of WWI, sets mystic, ironic texts from “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” by Walt Whitman. Holst’s personal favorite, his symphonic poem Egdon Heath (1928) was after Thomas Hardy who died just months before the premiere in New York.
The story of The Planets begins in 1913 when Holst took a vacation to Majorca (where Chopin famously had his travails composing his Preludes). There, the composer was given a book written by the astrologer, Alan Leo, which inspired Holst to conceive an orchestral work describing the astrological characteristics of the planets. The Planets was composed in the years 1914-1916 and orchestrated in 1917. But its performance history is unusual. The first performance in 1918 was a private, invitation-only affair for 250 people where Holst’s composer friend Balfour Gardiner funded the rental of Queen’s Hall in London and the participation of the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult.
This was an impressive expenditure, indeed, considering that Holst originally was going to simply call his opus “Seven Pieces for Large Orchestra.” That would have been “truth in advertising” because the complete orchestral forces include [unusual instruments emphasized]: Four flutes (doubling piccolo and alto flute), three oboes (doubling bass oboe or heckelphone), one English horn, three clarinets, one bass clarinet, three bassoons, and one contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones (including one bass trombone), and two tubas including tenor tuba -- aka a “euphonium,” two timpanists (playing often six timpani), snare drum, bass drum, triangle, cymbals, tam-tam, glockenspiel, xylophone, and tubular bells, organ, celesta, and two harps, and a large string section to balance the other instrumental forces. Plus, oh yes, a wordless female chorus for the final movement, “Neptune, The Mystic.”
The first complete performance at a public concert was given at the Queen's Hall on November 15, 1920, by theLondon Symphony Orchestra. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock gave the US premiere on December 31, 1920. The popularity of The Planets “skyrocketed” after those early performances much to Holst’s chagrin because he was a shy man and because the attention to this one piece seemingly did nothing to promote his other works.
The movements are labeled with their astrological characteristics. They are ordered in symphonic, aesthetic, space not as they progress in distance from the sun. The first movement, Mars, the Bringer of War has a pounding dissonance and the violent disruption of a march in five rather than four to the bar. The tenor tuba, often found in army bands, has a prominent solo adding to militaristic feel. (John Williams deeply imbibed lessons from this score as exemplified in his “Star Wars” scores.) Venus the Bringer of Peace follows with a slow-movement feel of softness with horn, harp, celesta, and solo violin. Anyone looking for eroticism might find it in the cello solos. Mercury, The Winged Messenger is a Scherzo which runs and skips in various ostinatos (repeated cells of melody). Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity has its ostinatos organized in a form of sections presented as “ABCD-A’B’C’D’.” The “D” middle section contains one of the most magnificent melodies of the orchestral repertoire. Saturn, The Bringer of Old Age has a slow sustained march toward oblivion with tubular bells pointing toward a final ritual. Uranus, The Magician, is another Scherzo often emphasizing the bassoons -- surely an homage to another famous magician, Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Neptune, the Mystic ends in a fade out as the “ah-ing” females draw us into deep space. One of the original choristers describes how, while singing backstage, the women were processed out of the building and on to the street as the doors to the hall were closed behind them. A truly special fadeout!
Program Note by IPO Board Member
Charles Amenta, M.D