Fate cruelly labels some great artists as one-hit wonders. Some believe Orson Welles never amounted to much beyond Citizen Kane, though he certainly did. John Milton wrote more than Paradise Lost, and not just verse. Leonardo da Vinci did not stop at the Mona Lisa. Equally, there was far more to Gustav Holst than his world-famous, frequently performed and endlessly recorded (there are more than 80 interpretations) orchestral suite The Planets.
It is remarkable, however, that many musically literate people struggle to name other works by the composer, born Gustavus von Holst in Cheltenham 150 years ago this month to a family of professional musicians of Scandinavian, German and Latvian descent (he dropped the von during the Great War). The disregard with which British classical music is often treated may partly explain ignorance of his achievements: out of snobbery, many regard the less obvious works of British composers as not worth expending too much intellectual curiosity upon. Holst is far from alone in enduring this neglect – or perhaps contempt. Another problem is that people often know what they like; they like The Planets, which most encounter through no conscious effort, but lack the motivation to explore its composer’s canon more widely.
This matters, because Holst is a great composer. Deploying adjectives such as “great” about any renowned artist (renown is easier to measure) hits the wall of subjectivity, but if one accepts a general definition of what “great” means in music, Holst qualifies. Anyone who knows The Planets can recognise elements of his stature as a composer. He is a master of orchestration. He displays substantial invention. He has the ability of the great composer to communicate ideas, impressions and feelings. He knows how to use music to paint a vivid picture. Perhaps most of all, he knows how to write music of profound appeal and that people want to hear time and again.
But if all one knows is The Planets, one knows only a little about Holst’s talent, and therefore about his greatness. He wrote numerous smaller orchestral masterpieces, including remarkable representations of places and landscapes. He was a master of the art song. He, with his close friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, drew deeply on the tradition of English folk song to try to create a distinct, benign national style of music. He wrote choral works of power and distinction. He cast off an early, and in his generation typical, devotion to the 19th century German masters not just to find an English voice, but to imbibe the influence of Indian and Middle Eastern music. He tried his hand, somewhat successfully, at opera and ballet, and there was copious chamber music. Had he not died comparatively young – at 59, suffering heart failure after an operation – he would have finished another symphony (he had completed a choral one, and early in his career a thematic one about the Cotswolds), of which only the Scherzo was finished.
From 1893 Holst trained under Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music. He was the fourth generation of musicians in his family, and would have been a pianist but for neuritis in his right arm. He did, however, master the trombone, and played it professionally. Even before attending the Royal College he composed prolifically, not least because he needed the money public performances could earn. He played the trombone professionally for the same reason. He failed to win a scholarship to the Royal College, so his father borrowed £100 so that he could attend. Holst saved money by renouncing alcohol and meat; even when he won a scholarship in 1895 he stuck to his austere ways, and remained an ascetic for the rest of his life.
One reason The Planets made such an impact when it was first performed in September 1918 was its astonishing originality: there had never been anything quite like it before. In the English canon, the previous 20 years had brought Elgar’s two symphonies and his Enigma Variations, and Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony and A London Symphony, all of which demonstrated ingenuity and talent: but none broke the mould in quite the way The Planets did in its overall conception, its use of the orchestra, or its variety of form. Holst composed the work between 1914 and 1916, and there had been great musical innovation on the continent in the immediately preceding years, notably from Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel and Arnold Schoenberg. Holst never quite had their radicalism, but he could match their imagination, and did so within an idiom he felt to be natural to him. Within that idiom, however, he was anything but conservative.
But then Holst was not really conservative in any sense. An early influence on him was William Morris, and while still a student he joined the Hammersmith Socialist Club at Kelmscott House. Vaughan Williams said his friend’s commitment to socialism was rooted in his belief in comradeship and not in any profound political conviction. He was also influenced by George Bernard Shaw, and when he rented a cottage in the Essex village of Thaxted, he started an annual festival with the assistance of the vicar, Conrad Noel, a prominent Christian socialist. Some may find Holst’s activism at odds with the way he earned his living for most of his life – as music master at the elite St Paul’s Girls’ School in west London from 1905 until his death in 1934 – but he also devoted many of his evenings to work at the charitable institution Morley College, where he was director of music from 1907 to 1924.
Holst also conducted the Hammersmith Socialist Choir, in which he met his future wife, Isobel Harrison; and in 1907 they had a daughter, Imogen, who became a considerable musician in her own right, not least as a collaborator with Benjamin Britten. As Holst’s workload increased in his thirties so his health deteriorated, and with financial help from Vaughan Williams (who had considerable private means) he went to North Africa for some warm weather in 1908, and it was there he had the inspiration to write his orchestral suite Beni Mora. He was always an extensive reader, and taught himself Sanskrit before writing several works based on Indian texts.
The Planets brought him considerable fame, which he disliked. He was intensely modest, and this trait also helped dim appreciation and knowledge of the rest of his music. Imogen inherited this attitude to her father’s work, and actively talked his achievements down, notably after his death, with remarks about the austerity and coldness of much of his music. She seems not to have grasped the breadth of the forces that inspired him. Holst read widely, and as well as his ventures into Sanskrit, he shared with Vaughan Williams the vogue for setting Walt Whitman. He was inspired by Thomas Hardy (most obviously in his brooding orchestral work “Egdon Heath”) and searched widely for interesting texts for his songs, such as the contemporary poet Humbert Wolfe.
If one wants to explore Holst more widely, where are the most rewarding places to start? Beni Mora has been described as the first piece of minimalist music written in England; when in Algiers, in the Street of the Ouled Naïls he heard a man play on a bamboo pipe the same eight-note Arab folk-tune repeatedly for two hours; he bases the third and last movement on this tune with hypnotic success. The first two movements are dances, their exoticism augmented by the composer’s orchestration and use of rhythm. The best recording is by Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic on Lyrita, which also includes several other peerless interpretations of Holst’s lesser-known works, including his Japanese Suite of 1915. Before the Great War, Japanese culture was highly popular in Britain and it fascinated Holst. It was not practical for him to travel there, so instead he spent an afternoon with a performer in a Noh play then on in the West End, while the actor whistled Japanese folk songs that Holst wrote down. He captures the distinctiveness of their idiom, while using Western forms to express them.
Anyone wanting to understand Holst’s imaginative use of Indian sources should listen to his chamber opera Sāvitri, written at the start of the Great War but not performed professionally until 1921; there is a landmark Decca recording by Imogen Holst conducting the English Chamber Orchestra with Janet Baker, Robert Tear and Thomas Hemsley as soloists. Critics agree that although the music, as in the Japanese Suite, remains Western, the integrity of the Indian influence is uncompromised.
Holst’s finest art songs are, perhaps, his Humbert Wolfe Songs from 1929; one, “A Little Music”, is among the best of the whole English musical renaissance. There is a faultless recording by Philip Langridge and Steuart Bedford on Naxos. But for me the ultimate Holst – and I would prize it even more highly than The Planets – is to be found on the Boult Lyrita record already mentioned: the orchestral version of his “Hammersmith: Prelude and Scherzo”. It was written in 1930 as a sound-picture of a part of London Holst had known intimately for nearly 40 years, with the mayhem of its traffic, the cheeky whistling of its barrow-boys and the bustle of its people – all framed by dawn and dusk on the eternal River Thames flowing under Hammersmith Bridge. If any work defines Holst’s genius, this is it.
[See also: The women classical music forgot]
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This article appears in the 18 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, What’s the story?