Hinterland

The success of The Planets became Holst’s curse but he was so much more than a one-hit wonder

This year is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Gustav Holst. “Ah, yes,” I can hear some of you say, “The Planets”. I have long regarded that work of genius as Holst’s misfortune. Some composers write one piece so amazing that they are known for nothing else: think of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, or Widor’s Toccata. One of the two sad aspects to Holst is that to aficionados The Planets is not necessarily his finest piece of music. He wrote many other works that reflect his genius, express his own peculiar voice and that embed themselves in the listener’s consciousness with ease and permanence: yet many choose not even to explore them.

And the second sad aspect was his relatively early death – in 1934, aged just 59, from heart failure after an operation for a duodenal ulcer. Had he lived as long as his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, he would not have died until

1958, and just think what else he might have written by then. Most tantalisingly, he left behind him the scherzo of an otherwise unwritten symphony. It has all the qualities one associates with late Holst: a sardonic jauntiness, a peculiarly English beauty that never goes near the pastoral, a definite momentum and hints of darkness; but above all, superb powers of orchestration. Vaughan Williams had met Holst at the Royal College of Music in the 1890s and said that Holst had had the greatest influence on his own music. Listening to both composers, the statement appears absolutely true.

What is most astonishing about Holst, aside from his natural talent, was the sheer range of his intellectual curiosity. As a student at the RCM, he was under the spell of the German masters, as for a time was Vaughan Williams. In Holst’s case, the main influence was Wagner, and early orchestral works such as A Winter Idyll

(1897) and his Walt Whitman Overture (1899) have Wagner’s lushness and bombast about them. Then came the influence of folksong, which he imbibed with Vaughan Williams: and which he incorporated into his Two Songs Without Words and A Somerset Rhapsody (both 1906).

But Holst was particularly susceptible to mysticism and to the East, particularly India and Arabia, and this plays a huge part in his music from about 1907 onwards, starting with his Hymns from the Rig Veda, the words to which he translated from the Sanskrit himself: his mental athleticism was unstoppable. The following year came his opera Sāvitri (1916), drawing on Hindu influences; and then, in Algiers in 1908 for his health, he heard a man in a back street play the same phrase on a flute for over two hours, and he was inspired to write his three-movement suite Beni Mora (1912). The tune figures, for a few minutes only, in the remarkable final movement, which musicologists have identified as an early example of minimalism. Holst’s next flirtation with the East took him to Japan: or rather to the dressing room of a theatre in the West End of London in 1915, where a Japanese dancer whistled him some of his native folk songs, and Holst turned

A Japanese dancer whistled him native folk songs in a West End dressing room

them into his Japanese Suite.

He did that while writing The Planets (1914-17); composing that and much else while teaching for a living at St Paul’s Girls’ School in west London. Although a prolific composer, he was not rich. Only after his death would his royalties mount up, mostly for The Planets. Yet there was more remarkable music to come, from a variety of inspirations. His Choral Symphony (1923-24) set well known poetry by Keats, but his Twelve Humbert Wolfe Songs (1929) are highly original settings of a contemporary popular poet, redolent of the shifts in musical language of the 1920s, and among his best work.

His later years were notable for a glut of choral and ballet music, The Golden Goose (1926), with a witty libretto by his pupil Jane Joseph (who also died far too young), being one of the more remarkable. His orchestral music in these years was rare, but outstanding: his Brook Green Suite (1933), his echoes of the bleakness of Hardy in Egdon Heath (1927), and the work I regard as his masterpiece, Hammersmith (1930). More of that another time: but until then, do explore this awesome composer – and be sure to venture far beyond The Planets.