Musicians - Gustav Holst

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	Musicians - Gustav Holst

Gustav Theodore Holst (September 21, 1874 – May 25, 1934) was an English composer. He is most famous for his orchestral suite The Planets. His music was influenced by Indian spiritualism and English folk tunes, and is well known for unconventional use of meter and haunting melodies.

Life

Early life

Gustavus Theodor von Holst was born in 1874 in Cheltenham, England to a family of Swedish extraction (by way of Latvia and Russia), and was educated at Pate's Grammar School. His father was 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. He grew up in the world of Wilde, Wells, Doyle, Gaugin, Monet, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Puccini. (He dropped the 'von' from his name in response to anti-German sentiment in England during World War I, making it official by deed poll in 1918.)

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.

He attended the newly founded Royal College of Music in London on a scholarship, studying with Charles V. Stanford, and there 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.

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 William Morris, both of whom were of England’s most outspoken supporters of the socialist movement in England.

It was also during these years that Holst became interested in Indian mysticism and spirituality, and this interest was to influence his later works, including Sita, a three-act opera based on an episode in the Ramayana, Savitri, 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 so that he didn’t have to rely 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 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.

He found a job as the Director of Music at St Paul’s Girls' School in Hammersmith, London, where he composed a successful and still popular work for the school orchestra St Paul's Suite in 1913. Holst's compositions for the 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.

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.

It was also at this time that musical society as a whole, and 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 traveled outside the bounds of Europe, heading to French-controlled Algeria in 1906 on doctors 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 competition. 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 traveling, 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’.

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