Gustav Holst - Biography
Gustav Holst famed composer of the Planets was born on September 21st 1874 in Cheltenham England and died in London on May 21st 1934 in London. He was born to a family of Swedish extraction, his father Adolf von Host was an organist and Choir director (Holst dropped the von during the First Word War). His father gave him musical instruction from an early age; he was a sickly child prone to nervous attacks. He blossomed when in his early 20’s he entered the Royal College of Music in London it was there that he met Ralph Vaughn Williams who was to become his lifelong friend. Holst was at time a fervent Socialist of the Fabian bent (they advocated social reform for the poor and weren’t communistic) and attended lectures by the leading proponents George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Beatrice and Sidney West. He also became a staunch advocate of vegetarianism and developed a lifelong fascination with Indian religion and philosophy. At the time Holst was barely making a living as a trombonist in theatre and Café Orchestras.
Holst first significant compositions in the late 1890’s include A Walt Whitman Overture, A Winters’s Idyll and a Symphony in F the Cotsworlds. Holst in the new century wrote works that reflected his fascination with Hinduism that include the full scale opera Sita the short chamber opera Savitri, the choral pieces Rig Vida and the Cloud Messenger all with text translated from Sanskrit often by Holst himself (that he learned by going to University courses). He got married during this time and he and his wife Isobela had a daughter Imogen in 1907 who would herself become a significant conductor, composer, her father’s biographer and his most fervent musical advocate.
Along with Vaughn Williams he was a key in forming the English pastoral and modal musical movement using the great Tudor and Elizabethan folk tradition rather than the Germanic models that was taught in English academic circles. Two successful works from 1911were the Military Band Suite’s. Holst in 1913 was suffering from severe asthma and depression and his doctor’s advice was to travel and he set out for a long trip to Catalonia with two young composer friends Balfour Gardiner and Arnold Bax. Holst had now become a teacher in a girl’s school St. Paul’s where besides his duties a music instructor he led the schools orchestra and choir. It was for this orchestra that Holst composed his well known St. Paul’s Suite for string orchestra. Holst became absorbed during this period with astrology which would lead to him writing his most famous work The Planets. The work which unlike most of Holst’s works is written for a huge orchestra supplemented with an organ and women’s chorus consists of seven pieces depicting the then known planets less earth (English composer Colin Matthews in the 1990’s added a Pluto piece, but we are now told Pluto is not a planet). The first performances of this piece were associated with a young friend conductor Adrian Boult soon to become the eminent Sir Adrian Boult Holst’s greatest interpreter. Holst was a patriot and volunteered for the Army during the First World War but his poor health .precluded his acceptance. He was given a position as a YMCA music instructor towards the end of the war.
After the war he wrote a major choral composition the Ode to Death with a text by Walt Whitman just before the end of it he wrote his best known choral piece The Hymn of Jesus. He wrote an opera in 1922 The Perfect Fool parodying Wagner’s Parsifal of which now the orchestral suite is occasionally performed and a massive and powerful Choral Symphony in 1924 which should be better known. His health in 1923 collapsed and he had to resign from daily teaching. The balance of his life was spent as a guest conductor of his works and as a lecturer and composer. To commemorate the recent death of novelist Thomas Hardy he wrote his symphonic poem Egdon Heath. Holst also composed two small scale operas during this period A Wandering Scholar and At Boar’s Head. Holst visited America and conducted his works including The Planets. His tour was successful enough to have Walter Damrosch offer him a commission to write a symphony which he couldn’t fulfill. He even made a technologically crude but fascinating recording of The Planets in 1926.In 1930 he composed A Choral Fantasia and received a commission from the BBC to write a piece for military band Hammersmith to celebrate the borough he lived in.
Holst fell backwards from a conductor’s podium in 1930 and received a severe concussion which undermined his already precarious health. The most significant piece from his last four years was the Brook Green Suite a piece that is an impression of the environs of St. Paul’s’ School. Holst in his last months was experiencing severe stomach pains and died from complications of surgery to correct it on March 25th 1934; he was a few months short of sixty.
Holst reputation today rests to great extant on the great popularity of The Planets. It is ironic because so much of Holst’s music is gentle and chamber like, unlike most of the extrovert Planets with its huge orchestral effects (though Saturn and Neptune are far more characteristic). As noted his music was championed by Sir Adrian Boult and his daughter Imogen (who was also an amanuensis later on to Benjamin Britten). In recent years much of his work was brilliantly recorded by the late and much lamented Richard Hickox. Holst is an acquired taste but he is much more than a one work composer.