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Gustav Holst

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Performers and composers

   Gustav Holst
   Gustav Holst
   Gustav Holst
   Background information
   Birth name Gustav Holst
   Born September 21, 1874
   Flag of England Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England
   Died May 25, 1934
   Flag of England London, England
   Genre(s) Romantic
   Occupation(s) Composer

   Gustav Holst ( September 21, 1874 Cheltenham, Gloucestershire - May 25,
   1934) 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).

   Holst died on May 25, 1934, after stomach surgery, at age 59. 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.

Life

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, 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, 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.
   Royal College of Music (1894 site), where Gustav Holst & Ralph Vaughan
   Williams studied in 1895
   Royal College of Music ( 1894 site), where Gustav Holst & Ralph Vaughan
   Williams studied in 1895

   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; he chose not to add
   it to his suite, although a piece entitled "Pluto: The Renewer" was
   composed by Colin Matthews and has been lately included in select
   performances of The Planets, and may have been vindicated by the 2006
   decision by astronomers to downgrade Pluto's planetary status.

   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 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, of 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 he died of
   complications following stomach surgery 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.

Audio Biography

   In 2007, BBC Radio 4 produced a radio play "The Bringer of Peace" by
   Martyn Wade, which is an intimate biographical portrait of composer
   Gustav Holst. The play follows his early dismay at his lack of
   composing success, to the creation of the Planets Suite; it is in seven
   tiers, following the structure of the Planets Suite. Adrian Scarborough
   played Gustav Holst. The producer was David Hitchinson.

Selected works

   The following are some of the compositions by Gustav Holst:
     * First Suite in Eb for Military Band ( 1909)
         1. Chaconne
         2. Intermezzo
         3. March
     * Second Suite in F for Military Band ( 1911)
         1. March: Morris Dance, Swansea Town, Claudy Banks
         2. Song Without Words "I Love my Love"
         3. Song of the Blacksmith
         4. Fantasia on the "Dargason"
     * St Paul's Suite Op.29 No.2 (Finale is another arrangement of 4th
       movement in Second Suite) ( 1913)
         1. Jig
         2. Ostinato
         3. Intermezzo
         4. Finale (The Dargason)
     * The Planets Suite Op. 32 ( 1916)
         1. Mars, the Bringer of War
         2. Venus, the Bringer of Peace
         3. Mercury, the Winged Messenger
         4. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity (main theme:" I Vow to Thee,
            My Country")
         5. Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
         6. Uranus, the Magician
         7. Neptune, the Mystic

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