1874–1934 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Gustav Holst (1874—1934) was an English composer and teacher, the author of the orchestral suite The Planets. Born in Cheltenham, he studied at the Royal College of Music, played the trombone and taught in London schools. Besides The Planets he wrote operas, choral music and works for wind band; our catalogue has his choral pieces and a trio.
Gustav Holst was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, on 21 September 1874, into a family of musicians. His father, Adolph von Holst, played the organ and led the choir at All Saints' Church; he taught as well and gave piano concerts. His mother, the pianist Clara, had once been Adolph's pupil and became his first wife.
The composer's great-grandfather, Matthias Holst, a native of Riga of German descent, worked in St Petersburg as a composer and harpist for the Russian imperial court. His son Gustav came to England with his parents in 1802, while still a child, wrote salon music and became a well-known harp teacher. He added the aristocratic "von" to the family name, hoping for greater prestige and more pupils.
Gustav had lessons on the piano and the violin, enjoying the former but detesting the latter. When he was twelve, he took up the trombone at Adolph's suggestion, since his father thought that a brass instrument would reduce how often he suffered asthma attacks. From 1886 to 1891 Holst attended Pate's Grammar School; his early works included pieces for piano and organ, songs, hymns and symphonies. The strongest influence at that stage was Sullivan, followed by Mendelssohn, Chopin and Grieg.
After leaving school in 1891, he had four months of counterpoint lessons with George Frederick Sims in Oxford, paid for by his father. On his return, at 17, he received his first professional post as organist and choir director in Wyck Rissington in Gloucestershire, which gave him valuable experience and helped him sharpen his conducting. In November 1891 he perhaps made his first public appearance as a pianist, playing Brahms's Hungarian Dances with his father at a concert in Cheltenham.
In 1893, after a successful performance of his piece Lansdown Castle, or The Sorcerer of Tewkesbury, Holst applied to the Royal College of Music and was admitted as a student, but without a scholarship. Short of money, he economised on food, became a vegetarian and gave up alcohol entirely. He kept to these principles two years later, when a scholarship was finally awarded to him.
His teachers at the college were Frederick Sharp (piano), William Stevenson Hoyte (organ), George Case (trombone), George Jacobi (orchestration), the college's director Hubert Parry (history) and Charles Villiers Stanford (composition). He paid his way by playing the trombone, working at seaside resorts during the summer and in London theatres during the winter. In 1897 he briefly played in an orchestra conducted by Richard Strauss at the Queen's Hall in London.
In 1895 Holst met Ralph Vaughan Williams. They remained close friends for life, and no one else influenced Holst's music more. While still a student he joined the Kelmscott House Socialist Club in Hammersmith and received an invitation to lead the Hammersmith Socialist Choir, whose singers he taught madrigals by Thomas Morley, chorales by Henry Purcell and music by Mozart, Wagner and his own.
Some of his pieces were published and performed repeatedly. In 1897 The Times printed a largely favourable article about his song "Light Leaves Whisper". Yet he realised he could not live by composing alone, so from 1898 he worked as an organist in several London churches while still playing trombone in theatre bands. That same year he was appointed principal trombonist and répétiteur with the Carl Rosa Opera Company, and he toured with a Scottish orchestra.
Holst's symphony The Cotswolds (Op. 8) was first played in 1902 by the Bournemouth orchestra under Dan Godfrey; it was dedicated to William Morris, who died in October 1896. A year after the premiere Gustav's father, Adolph von Holst, died and left him a small inheritance.
In the Hammersmith Socialist Choir Gustav met a singer, Isobel Harrison, fell in love with her and married her. The marriage was registered on 22 June 1901 at the Fulham register office and lasted until his death. Their daughter Imogen was born in 1907.
In 1903 Holst decided to give up orchestral playing and concentrate on composition. Composing brought in too little money, however, and two years later he accepted a teaching post at James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich, where he stayed until 1921. From 1905 until his death he was the music director of the Hammersmith girls' school named after St Paul, and from 1907 to 1924 he held a similar post at Morley College in London. He taught as well at the Passmore Edwards Settlement, and two Bach cantatas had their British premieres there under his direction.
Literature often inspired Holst: he turned to Thomas Hardy, Robert Bridges and Walt Whitman, and in 1899 wrote an orchestral overture in Whitman's honour (Op. 7). While touring with Carl Rosa's troupe he read some books by Max Müller and became absorbed in Sanskrit writings, especially the Rig Veda hymns (Op. 26, 1908—1912). The English translations seemed to him insufficiently accurate, so in 1909 he began studying Sanskrit at University College London. His own translations underlie the operas Sita (Op. 23, 1899—1906) and Savitri (Op. 25, 1908) and the piece The Cloud Messenger (Op. 30, 1909—1910).
Holst was not as keen on folk music as his friend Vaughan Williams, but he still included folk melodies in his own works and made several folk-song arrangements. The Somerset Rhapsody (Op. 21/2, 1907) came about at the prompting of Cecil Sharp, a collector of folk songs, and builds on melodies he had marked. A trip to Algeria for the sake of his health gave Holst the atmosphere and street music that inspired his suite Beni Mora (Op. 29/1, 1909—1910).
While on holiday in Spain, Holst met the brothers Clifford and Arnold Bax, who got him interested in astrology. This gave him the idea of writing a piece in honour of the planets, and the orchestral suite The Planets was the result.
The river air was bad for Holst's health, so he and his family left Brook Green, a prosperous part of London, for the provincial town of Thaxted, where they lived until 1925. He sometimes served as organist and choirmaster at the parish church and grew increasingly interested in bell-ringing. There he befriended the priest Conrad Noel and dedicated to him the a cappella chorus "This Have I Done for My True Love" (Op. 34/1, 1916), to thank him for his interest in the earliest roots of religion. Holst always called the piece "Dancing Day". It was first performed in May 1918 at the third Trinity festival in Thaxted.
Holst kept teaching and composing through the war years and worked on The Planets. His chamber opera Savitri reached the stage in December 1916, performed by London School of Opera students at the Wellington Hall. In 1917 he completed The Hymn of Jesus (Op. 37), a work for chorus and orchestra on Latin and English hymn texts, which is now among his most popular pieces.
Before leaving for Salonika, where British troops had been sent, Holst hurriedly persuaded the conductor Adrian Boult to perform The Planets. Girls from St Paul's Church helped to copy the score, and they, together with pupils of St Paul's Girls' School, sang the choral parts of the final movement. The general public heard the suite only in February 1919, under Boult, after Holst had already left for Greece, and at the conductor's insistence only five of the seven movements were played. In June 1919 Holst returned from Greece and resumed teaching and composing: he became a lecturer at the University of Reading, taught composition alongside Vaughan Williams and, while working at St Paul's Girls' School, wrote Ode to Death (Op. 38, 1919) to a poem by Whitman.
In 1921 Holst was suddenly sought after: the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra vied for the right to give the first American performance of The Planets. He disliked becoming famous, however; he turned down honours, awards and interviews and firmly opposed giving autographs. His sharp reaction may have been prompted by the press misreading his comic opera The Perfect Fool (Op. 39, 1918—1922) as a satire on Parsifal, which he firmly denied.
The Perfect Fool had its premiere at the Royal Opera House in 1923, with the soprano Maggie Teyte and Eugene Goossens conducting, and mostly enthusiastic reviews. That same year Holst fell and suffered concussion but recovered quickly and accepted an invitation to lecture at the University of Michigan in the United States. When he returned to London, demand for him soared, yet his health worsened and, on his doctor's advice, he gave up all professional activity and went to Thaxted. In 1925 he went back to work at St Paul's, but never took up his other official posts again.
Freed from his duties, Holst threw himself into composition. This period produced the First Choral Symphony (Op. 41, 1923—1924), the Shakespearean miniature opera At the Boar's Head (Op. 42, 1924) and the suite Moorside for wind band (1928). Of the Second Choral Symphony, set to words by George Meredith, only fragments survive.
In 1927, inspired by Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Holst wrote the orchestral piece Egdon Heath (Op. 47). It was performed in February 1928 at a memorial concert in New York, a month after the writer's death, and the next day the Birmingham orchestra gave the British premiere under Holst himself. The Times noted a certain bleakness in the piece but put it down to Hardy's equally bleak view of the world. Hostile reviews of some of his early works had upset Holst, but he did not care about critical opinion of Egdon Heath, which, according to Byron Adams, he considered his most perfectly realised composition.
Harvard University invited Holst to lecture during the first six months of 1932. Passing through New York, he was glad to see his brother Emil again. Later Gustav's health deteriorated sharply and he gave up all musical activity, except that in March 1934 he supervised a performance of his Brook Green Suite (1933) by the orchestra of St Paul's Girls' School. Gustav Theodore Holst died in London on 25 May 1934 of heart failure after an operation on an intestinal ulcer. His ashes were buried in Chichester Cathedral, not far from the memorial to Thomas Weelkes, Holst's favourite Tudor composer. Bishop George Bell gave the memorial address, and Ralph Vaughan Williams conducted music by Holst and himself.
Holst's style was shaped by many composers, above all Wagner and Richard Strauss: it was his own, though not an innovative one. Ravel and English folk melodies helped him move beyond these influences. According to his daughter Imogen, discovering English folk songs changed his orchestral writing, and the Somerset Rhapsody did much to drive out the chromaticism that dominated his early works.
Folk song attracted Holst not only for its melodies but also for its simplicity and economy of expression. As a result, many contemporaries, even admirers, found his style severe and difficult. In the view of Colin Matthews, the habit of identifying Holst with The Planets hides his standing as a composer of real originality. Features of his music include unusual time signatures, modal shifts, various ostinatos and polytonality. The critic John Warrack argues that Holst understood the importance of folk songs instinctively, perhaps better than any other English composer. Vaughan Williams noted that in his music Holst always said what he wanted to say directly and concisely.
Holst's music was accused of coldness. Imogen Holst objected, pointing to the rushing movement of modal melodies; Michael Kennedy sees real warmth in the Twelve Songs (Op. 48, 1929) and the Twelve Welsh Folk Songs (1930—1931). Colin Matthews considers the suite Beni Mora the composer's most individual work of the years before the First World War, and finds a hint of minimalism in its third movement, where a four-bar theme is constantly repeated. As an experienced orchestral player, Holst imagined music from the performers' point of view and was sure that, however difficult, their parts were always playable.
Our catalogue currently holds three Holst editions: Cranham (hymntune) and Thaxted for SATB choir, and Terzetto (H158) for trio. Cranham is marked "Beginner+", Thaxted and Terzetto "Advanced". If you are not sure where to begin, try Cranham: it has the easiest level of the three.
Holst did not found or lead a school of composers, but he influenced both contemporaries and successors. Vaughan Williams called Holst's work the greatest influence on his own music. Michael Tippett, who succeeded Holst as director of music at Morley College, is regarded as his most significant artistic successor. His pupil Edmund Rubbra acknowledged that he and other young English composers had adopted the economy of his style. Holst gained international recognition only after the First World War, thanks to The Planets.