The Many Surprises About Holst
The Planets by Gustav Holst is arguably one of the most famous works by an English composer. Its position within pop culture and its various echoes within film scores and British music of the 20th and 21st centuries are still reverberating to this day. As a result, Holst is often viewed as the quintessential English composer. However, there is more than meets the eye.
The first surprise of Holst is his surname. Unlike the prevailing stereotype of the most English of English composers, Holst's family is historically from Riga, then in Prussia and now the capital of modern Latvia. Holst's grandfather Gustavus moved to England and even added a von into the family name (making him Gustav von Holst) in the hopes of appealing to social trends of the time and to be able to earn his keep as a teacher. This choice ironically had to be reversed around the time of anti-German sentiment in the UK with the advent of the First World War.
Many biographies and discussions about Holst highlight that his health was something that niggled away at him from a very young age. Having asthma, poor eyesight, and neuritis impacted not only his early musical experiences but had a lasting effect on his life. He was encouraged to play the trombone in an attempt to help his asthma - the trombone was thought to be a better choice of instrument than piano, which would have exacerbated the pain in Holst's arm.
Though he may not have considered it at the time, we can now appreciate Holst as a disabled composer by virtue of his living with the chronic pain of neuritis. A curious tidbit of history, which is not really considered a remarkably progressive idea, was the way Holst navigated his chronic pain when composing The Planets. The nearly fifty-minute work for orchestra is a massive task for any individual. Written between 1914 and 1917, the work was created amidst his obligations as Head of Music in St. Paul's School and Morley College.
Imogen Holst, daughter and biographer of Gustav Holst, as well as a composer in her own right, noted that without his 'scribes' Vally Lasker and Nora Day, Holst would not have been able to compose The Planets. The composition process was rather simple but incredibly effective. Holst would compose as much of the full score as possible until his neuritis became too painful. Vally and Nora would then transcribe the work for two pianos and play it to him. Holst was then able to amend the score or continue his work. This was undertaken in whatever window was available to him and is arguably one of the first historic examples we have in Britain of a composer working in a less conventional manner to accommodate their disability.
A similarly overlooked part of Holst's life is his politics. Holst was a good friend of William Morris and was also a member of the Hammersmith Socialist League wherein he conducted the choir. Though Imogen Holst underplays the role of politics in her father's work, one curious piece that reveals some of her father's political thinking is his opera The Idea. The opera is a cheeky work about a society that revolts against a Prime Minister when he proposes a very bad idea. The populace is only satisfied when the Prime Minister promises never to have an idea again.
Alongside this, despite being pictured as the quintessential British composer, Holst was deeply fascinated by the world outside of England. India was incredibly influential on his work and there are numerous examples of Holst's music that draw upon his interests in Indian myth, legend, and religion, including his four choral settings of the texts from the Rig Veda, his operas Sita and Savitri, Two Eastern Pictures and his large work The Cloud Messenger. He was similarly inspired by a trip to Algeria, which he was encouraged to take to help address his asthma, and there he wrote his wonderfully bold three movement work Beni Mora - a personal favourite of mine.
Holst's music is born of curiosity but shaped by the reality in which he lived. He was a man deeply inspired by humanity which can be seen through his work as a teacher, his music for amateurs like the Moorside Suite or St. Paul's Suite, his love of poetry, or fascination in the world, the universe, or the mystical. Had his health been better, he may have lived longer than sixty years, and like his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, he may have been able to be more proactive as a composer.
Without understanding this richness of inspiration and Holst's character, we only get a narrow vision of the composer. That being said, if our vision is solely of The Planets, we are still looking at a genius.