Gustav Holst

Early Life

Gustavus Theodore von Holst (he later dropped the ‘von’) was born and brought up in Cheltenham. His mother, Clara, was British and his musician father, Adolph, was of Swedish, Latvian and German heritage. The young Gustavus was prone to illness, particularly asthma, and his father encouraged him to take up the trombone to help alleviate his symptoms. After attending Cheltenham Grammar School he took counterpoint classes at Oxford, then entered the Royal College of Music in 1893, initially without a scholarship. He continued to study trombone, and also took composition classes with Stanford. To earn money to support himself, he played in London theatre bands, and in various seaside resorts.

A Professional and Spiritual Life

After leaving the Royal College of Music in 1898, Holst continued to work as a professional musician and got engaged to choral singer Isobel Harrison, whom he married in 1901. He became frustrated by the lack of time for composition and by his low income. In 1905, he began his teaching career, taking up the post of Director of Music at St Paul’s Girls School, and later at Morley College. His daughter, born in 1907, was the future composer Imogen Holst. During this period Holst developed a keen interest in folk music, as did many of his colleagues. Less conventional was his fascination with Hinduism; he taught himself Sanskrit and set various translated texts to music, such as his opera Sāvitri, and the cantata The Cloud Messenger. Holst often struggled to secure public performances of his pieces, with some works premiering several years after completion.

Cosmic Levels of Fame

Holst moved his family to Thaxted in Essex in 1913 while continuing to make use of a soundproofed ‘composing room’ at St Paul’s. Around the same time he became more interested in astrology, often preparing charts for family and friends. While he called it his ‘pet vice’, his immersion in the subject fed into his most famous work, The Planets, which is based on astrological rather than astronomical principles. It is a highly individual work, scored for vast orchestral forces, and was written between 1914–16. After its 1920 premiere it was an instant hit in the UK and abroad, with American orchestras competing for its first US performance. As an introverted character, Holst found the sudden fame disconcerting, but he was pleased by the increased interest in his back catalogue.

Final Years

After the Planets era, Holst was exhausted and often in poor health. He nonetheless carried on composing in his usual eclectic vein, with works inspired by folk music, the natural landscape, and even jazz following visits to the US. He continued to teach at St Paul’s, remaining Director of Music until the end of his life, and was honoured with a festival of his music in Cheltenham in 1927. He became very frail in the early 1930s, and died of heart failure during surgery in May 1934.

Holst had a broadminded and scholarly temperament, and absorbed a wide range of musical and extra-musical influences: his daughter Imogen wrote of him that ‘he hated conventionality, and rejoiced in ideas that were fantastic’. In terms of music, Wagner loomed large when he was starting out, hovering over such works as the Symphony in F major, especially its slow movement. The latter was itself a tribute to the artist and socialist William Morris, who Holst also greatly admired. Even some of his early Sanskrit settings are ‘Wagnerian’ in scale and sound, such as opera Sita and the The Cloud Messenger. Schoenberg was another important figure: along with its astrological foundations, The Planets was a direct homage to Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra.

The opera Sāvitri, also from Sanskrit, marked a turning point, with a dramatic reduction in forces and a pared-back, very distinctive musical style. The poetry of Thomas Hardy was yet another influence, leading to song settings and the orchestral piece Egdon Heath, based on a fictional place in Hardy’s novels.

Along with his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, Holst was drawn to the English folk song revival, which inspired several works including A Somerset Rhapsody and Six Choral Folksongs.