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Gustav Holst (September 21, 1874, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire - May 25, 1934,
London) was an English composer and was a music teacher for over 20 years. Holst is
most famous for his orchestral suite The Planets. Having studied at the Royal
College of Music in London, his early work was influenced by Ravel, Grieg, Richard
Strauss, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, but most of his music is highly original, with
influences from Hindu spiritualism and English folk tunes. Holst's music is well
known for unconventional use of metre and haunting melodies.
Gustav Holst wrote almost 200 catalogued compositions, including orchestral suites,
operas, ballets, concertos, choral hymns, and songs. (See Selected works,
below).
Holst became music master at St Paul's Girls' School in 1905 and also director of
music at Morley College in 1907, continuing in both posts until retirement (as
detailed below).
He was the brother of Hollywood actor Ernest Cossart, and father of the composer
and conductor Imogen Holst, who wrote a biography of her father in 1938.
 Name
He was originally named Gustavus Theodor von Holst but he dropped the von from his
name in response to anti-German sentiment in Britain during World War I, making it
official by deed poll in 1918.
Early
life
He was born in 1874 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England to a family of Swedish
extraction (by way of Latvia and Russia), and was educated at Cheltenham Grammar
School for Boys.
Holst's grandfather, Gustavus von Holst of Riga, Latvia, a composer of elegant harp
music, moved to England, becoming a notable harp teacher. Holst's father Adolph
Holst, an organist, pianist, and choirmaster, taught piano lessons and gave
recitals; and his mother, Clara von Holst, who died when Gustav was eight, was a
singer. As a frail child whose early recollections were musical, Holst had been
taught to play piano and violin, and began composing when he was about twelve.
Holst's father was the organist at All Saints' Church in Pittville, and his
childhood home is now a small museum, devoted partly to Holst, and partly to
illustrating local domestic life of the mid-19th century.
Holst grew up in the world of Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Gauguin, Monet, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Puccini. Both he and his
sister learned piano from an early age, but Holst, stricken with a nerve condition
that affected the movement of his right hand in adolescence, gave up the piano for
the trombone, which was less painful to play.
He attended the newly relocated Royal College of Music in London on a scholarship,
studying with Charles V. Stanford, and there in 1895, he met fellow student and
lifelong friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose own music was, for the most part,
quite different from Holst’s, but whose praise for his work was abundant and who
later shared an interest in Holst teaching the English vocal and choral tradition
(folk song, madrigals, and church music).
Holst was influenced during these years by socialism, and attended lectures and
speeches by George Bernard Shaw, with whom he shared a passion for vegetarianism,
and by William Morris, both of whom were among the UK's most outspoken supporters
of the socialist movement in the UK.
It was also during these years that Holst became interested in Hindu mysticism and
spirituality, and this interest was to influence his later works, including Sita
(1899–1906, a three-act opera based on an episode in the Ramayana), Sāvitri, a
chamber opera based on a tale from the Mahabharata, and Hymns from the Rig Veda, in
preparation for which he taught himself basic Sanskrit to avoid reliance on the
‘substandard’ translations of the day.
To earn a living in the era before he had a satisfactory income from his
compositions, he played the trombone in the Carl Rosa Opera Company and in a
popular orchestra called the 'White Viennese Band', conducted by Stanislas Wurm.
The music was cheap and repetitive and not to Holst's liking, and he referred to
this kind of work as 'worming' and regarded it as 'criminal'. Fortunately his need
to 'worm' came to an end as his compositions became more successful, and his income
was given stability by his teaching posts.
During these early years, he was influenced greatly by the poetry of Walt Whitman,
as were many of his contemporaries, and set his words in The Mystic Trumpeter
(1904). He also set to music poetry by Thomas Hardy and Robert Bridges.
Musical
career
In 1905, Holst was appointed Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School in
Hammersmith, London, where he composed the successful and still popular St Paul's
Suite for the school orchestra in 1913. In 1907, Holst also became director of
music at Morley College. Those two leadership positions were the most important of
his teaching posts, and he retained both posts until the end of his life.
During the first two decades of the 20th century, musical society as a whole, and
Holst's friend Vaughan Williams in particular, became interested in old English
folksongs, madrigal singers, and Tudor composers. Holst shared in his friend’s
admiration for the simplicity and economy of these melodies, and their use in his
compositions is one of his music’s most recognizable features.
Holst was an avid rambler. He walked extensively in Italy and France, and had
covered nearly every path in England by the time of his death. He also travelled
outside the bounds of Europe, heading to French-controlled Algeria in 1906 on
doctor's orders as a treatment for asthma and the depression that crippled him
after his submission failed to win the Ricordi Prize, a coveted award for
composition. His travels in the Arab and Berber land, including an extensive
bicycle tour of the Algerian Sahara, inspired the suite Beni Mora, written upon his
return.
After the lukewarm reception of his choral work The Cloud Messenger in 1912, Holst
was again off travelling, financing a trip with fellow composers Balfour Gardiner
and brothers Clifford Bax and Arnold Bax to Spain, with funds from an anonymous
donation. Despite being shy, Holst was fascinated by people and society, and had
always believed that the best way to learn about a city was to get lost in it. In
Gerona, Catalonia, he often disappeared, only to be found hours later by his
friends having abstract debates with local musicians. It was in Spain that Clifford
Bax introduced Holst to astrology, a hobby that was to inspire the later Planets
suite. He read astrological fortunes until his death, and called his interest in
the stars his "pet vice."
Shortly after his return, St Paul’s Girls School opened a new music wing, and Holst
composed St Paul’s Suite for the occasion. At around this time (1913), Stravinsky
premiered the Rite of Spring, sparking riots in Paris and caustic criticism in
London. A year later, Holst first heard Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, an
‘ultra-modern’ set of five movements employing ‘extreme chromaticism’ (the
consistent use of all 12 musical notes). Holst would have certainly been affected
by the performance and, although he had earlier lampooned the stranger aspects of
modern music (he had a strong sense of humour), the new music of Stravinsky and
Schoenberg influenced, if not initially spurred, his work on The Planets.
Holst's compositions for wind band, though relatively small in number, guaranteed
him a position as the medium's cornerstone, as seen in innumerable present-day
programmes featuring his two Suites for Military Band. His one work for brass band,
A Moorside Suite, remains an important part of the brass band repertoire.
The
Planets
Holst and wife Isobel bought a cottage in Thaxted, Essex and, surrounded by
medieval buildings and ample rambling opportunities, he started work on the suite
that would become his best known work, the orchestral suite The Planets. It was
meant to be a series of ‘mood pictures’ rather than anything concretely connected
with astrology or astronomy, though Holst was known to have been using the book
What Is A Horoscope by Alan Leo as a guide:
Mars – Independent, Ambitious, Headstrong
Venus – Awakens Affection and Emotion
Mercury – The ‘Winged Messenger of the Gods’, Resourceful, Adaptable
Jupiter – Brings Abundance, Perseverance
Holst was also influenced by a 19th-century astrologer called Raphael, whose book
concerning the planets' role in world affairs led Holst to develop the grand vision
of the planets that made The Planets suite such an enduring success.
The work was finished in two stages, with Mars, Venus and Jupiter written at one
time, and Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Mercury written after a break that Holst had
taken to work on other pieces. The work was finished in 1916. The influence of
Stravinsky was picked up by a critic who called it ‘the English Le Sacre du
Printemps (Rite of Spring)’.
The first of the seven pieces is Mars, ‘the most ferocious piece of music in
existence’, evoking a battle scene of immense proportion with its signature 5/4
metre (it changes to 5/2 and 3/4 at the end) and blatant dissonance. Holst directed
that it be played slightly faster than a regular march, giving it a mechanized and
inhuman character. It is often a surprise to learn that Mars was actually finished
just before the horrors of World War I. Mars is easily Holst’s most famous piece,
and has been quoted in everything from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos to video games.
Calm Venus and self-satisfied Jupiter, both also quite well known, demonstrate
influence from Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, Elgar and Schoenberg.
Uranus at first appears to be a quirky and frenetic homage to Dukas’s The
Sorcerer's Apprentice, but Holst did not know the Frenchman's score at the time.
Neptune is mysterious and evokes an other-worldly scene.
Most original is Saturn, in which 'a threatening clock ticks inexorably as the
bassline, revealing both the dignity and frailties of old age'. Saturn was
reputedly Holst's favourite of the seven movements.
Holst lived to see the discovery of Pluto in 1930. Although it was immediately
accepted as a planet, Holst chose not to add Pluto to his suite. He seems to have
been vindicated by the 2006 decision by the International Astronomical Union to
downgrade Pluto's planetary status to that of dwarf planet. A piece entitled
"Pluto: The Renewer" was composed by Colin Matthews in 2000, and it has been
occasionally included in performances of The Planets.
Holst himself conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the very first electrical
recording of The Planets, in 1926, for HMV. Although, as his daughter Imogen noted,
he couldn't quite achieve the gradual fade-out of women's voices and orchestra he
had written (owing to the limitations of early electrical recording), it was a
landmark recording of the work. The performance was later issued on LP and CD
format.
At the onset of World War I, Holst tried to enlist but was rejected because of his
bad eyes, bad lungs, and bad digestion. In wartime England, Holst was persuaded to
drop the ‘von’ from his name, as it aroused suspicion. His new music, however, was
readily received, as ‘patriotic’ and English music was demanded at concert halls,
partly due to a ban on all ‘Teutonic’ music. Towards the end of the war he was
offered a post within the YMCA’s educational work programme as Musical Director,
and he set off for Salonica (present day Thessoliniki, Greece) and Constantinople
in 1918. While he was teaching music to troops eager to escape the drudgery of army
life, The Planets Suite was being performed to audiences back home. Shortly after
his return after the war’s end, Holst composed Ode to Death, based upon a poem by
Walt Whitman.
During the years 1920 – 1923, Holst's popularity grew through the success of The
Planets and The Hymn of Jesus (1917) (based on the Apocryphal gospels), and the
publication of a new opera, The Perfect Fool (a satire of a work by Wagner). Holst
became something of 'an anomaly, a famous English composer’, and was busy with
conducting, lecturing, and teaching obligations. He hated publicity – he often
refused to answer questions posed by the press, and when asked for his autograph,
handed out prepared cards that read, “I do not hand out my autograph”. Though he
may not have liked the attention, he appreciated having enough money for the first
time in his life. Always frail, after a collapse in 1923 he retired from teaching
to devote the remaining (eleven) years of his life to composition.
Later
life
In the following years, he took advantage of new technology to publicize his work
through sound recordings and the BBC’s ‘wireless’ broadcasts. In 1927, he was
commissioned by the New York Symphony Orchestra to write a symphony. He took this
opportunity to work on an orchestral piece based on Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a work
that would become Egdon Heath, and which would be first performed a month after
Hardy’s death, in his memory. By this time, Holst was ‘going out of fashion’, and
the piece was poorly reviewed. However, Holst is said to have considered the short,
subdued but powerful tone poem his greatest masterpiece. The piece has been much
better received in recent years, with several recordings available.
Towards the end of his life, in 1930, Gustav Holst wrote Choral Fantasia (1930),
and he was commissioned by the BBC to write a piece for military band: the
resulting Hammersmith was a tribute to the place where he had spent most of his
life, a musical expression of the London borough (of Hammersmith), which begins
with an attempt to recreate the haunting sound of the River Thames sleepily flowing
its way.
Gustav Holst had a lifetime of poor health worsened by a concussion during a
backward fall from the conductor's podium, from which he never fully recovered. In
his final 4 years, Holst grew ill with stomach problems. One of his last
compositions, The Brook Green Suite, named after the land on which St Paul’s Girls’
School was built, was performed for the first time a few months before his death.
He died of complications following stomach surgery, in London, on May 25, 1934. His
ashes were interred at Chichester Cathedral in West Sussex, with Bishop George Bell
giving the memorial oration at the funeral.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Gustav
Holst - Generator - Biography
