Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
Gustav Holst was born in 1874 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, into a musical family, including a great-grandfather and grandfather who had both been composers and harp teachers. His father was an organist and choirmaster in Cheltenham, and his mother was a talented singer and pianist. As a child, he played the piano, violin and trombone, and dreamed of one day becoming a pianist. However, he suffered from a nerve condition in his arm, and sadly wasn’t able to pursue his piano studies. Instead, he studied composition at the Royal College of Music, and became a professional trombonist and music teacher to support himself whilst he wrote his music.
As a music teacher, Holst taught in many schools across London, and played a particularly important role in encouraging the study of music amongst girls and young women in his posts at James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich and St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith. Ralph Vaughan Williams, a famous composer and close friend of Holst’s, wrote that ‘[Holst] did away with the childish sentimentality which schoolgirls were supposed to appreciate and substituted Bach and Vittoria; a splendid background for immature minds.’
Holst’s early compositions were often inspired by literature, folk music and his frequent walking holidays, and they achieved moderate success in the early twentieth century. But it was his orchestral suite The Planets that made his name.
The Planets
Composed in 1916, The Planets has since been performed by orchestras across the world, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest orchestral suites ever written. It has hugely influenced music written for film by modern day composers; for instance, John Williams’s music for the film franchise Star Wars sometimes sounds very much like The Planets. Many orchestras have recorded The Planets, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Parts of it are very famous indeed, such as the hymn tune ‘I vow to thee my country,’ which comes from the fourth movement ‘Jupiter: The Bringer of Jollity.’ The whole work is full of different musical characters, drama, beauty, anger, mystery – and audiences love to hear it live.
But Holst, who was a very shy man, wasn’t pleased with the success. He said:
“It is the greatest thing to be a failure. If nobody likes your work, you have to go on just for the sake of the work. And you’re in no danger of letting the public make you repeat yourself. Every artist ought to pray that he may not be a success.”
He found that, having written such a successful and popular piece, everyone wanted him to compose the same sort of music again. But he didn’t want to – instead, he wanted to explore different sorts of sounds and musical ideas. He never wrote for such a big orchestra again, and none of his later pieces were ever as popular as The Planets. But he didn’t seem to mind.
Holst wasn’t interested in being famous or successful – he simply enjoyed composing and making music.
The Movements of The Planets
Holst’s starting point for The Planets isn’t scientific – he’s not writing a musical description of what each planet is like in reality. Instead, Holst takes his starting point from the gods of Ancient Greece and Rome, from whom many of the planets take their names. There are seven movements in the piece, in this order:
- Mars: The Bringer of War
- Venus: The Bringer of Peace
- Mercury: The Winged Messenger
- Jupiter: The Bringer of Jollity
- Saturn: The Bringer of Old Age
- Uranus: The Magician
- Neptune: The Mystic
The order of the pieces represents a journey from the earthly to the spiritual. The first four pieces are about earthly things: war, peace, communication and joy. The last four are based in the spiritual realm of magic and mysticism. The piece in between, Saturn: The Bringer of Old Age, is the journey between the two. In the beginning it is slow, tired and quiet. Then, it builds up to a tremendously loud middle section full of tolling bells, after which the music becomes serenely beautiful, featuring harps and flutes.
Mars: The Bringer of War
The music for Mars: The Bringer of War marches on relentlessly. It starts with a repeated rhythm played by all the strings tapping their instruments with the wooden part of their bow – an unusual technique called col legno, which means ‘with the wood’ in Italian. It’s a really distinctive, creepy sound.
The music grows and grows – that rhythm repeating unstoppably and getting louder and louder. Perhaps an army is getting closer? Over the rhythm a melody gradually rises, initially played in the low brass and woodwind, but eventually performed by the whole orchestra.
You will hear fanfares from the brass instruments and some gigantic climaxes (listen out for the organ joining near the end). One of the instruments playing these fanfares is the euphonium, an instrument that looks a bit like the tuba but is most commonly found in brass bands. A trombonist in the orchestra swaps their trombone for a euphonium in this piece.
The middle section is quiet and creepy, tense and foreboding. The strings and woodwind instruments slide around a strange melody, punctuated by side drum and trumpets playing quiet snatches of the pounding rhythm from earlier.
The section builds up, leading to the whole orchestra playing the repeated rhythm again very loudly. The whole opening section is repeated, but with a different ending. Here, there are massive repeated chords for everyone to play together, marked ffff – meaning as loud as possible!
Mars is a particularly evocative and ferocious piece, and was completed just before the start of the First World War.
Venus: The Bringer of Peace
Venus: The Bringer of Peace is a huge contrast to Mars. In Mars, Holst uses large sections of the orchestra playing together, but here he often highlights small groups or solo instruments, creating more delicate textures. Listen out for the beautiful and simple horn solo at the very start, or the solo violin melody later on. This glowing music has expressive melodies and gentle rocking accompaniments, with two harps helping to create this glimmering sound world. They are joined towards the end by a celeste – a keyboard instrument which looks like a small piano, but contains metal chimes instead (it’s perhaps most famously featured in ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker).
Mercury: The Winged Messenger
In Ancient Roman mythology, the god Mercury was the winged messenger, taking messages from one god to another. Messengers move quickly, and in Holst’s musical description of Mercury the musical ideas jump around between the different instruments – like a message moving at speed between different people. It’s a lively piece, constantly changing direction, which makes it difficult for the musicians to perform! Listen out for the harps throughout the beginning section. Like Venus, this movement also features the celeste.
There are moments where it settles down, though it remains fast. Listen out for a repeated glockenspiel note in the music (which sounds a bit like Morse code). This is followed by a longer melody, first played by a solo violin. It is repeated 12 times, but every time the way Holst uses the instruments – the way he orchestrates it – is completely different. The music gets louder and louder, with the whole orchestra playing at the loudest point, before the music dies away again.
The music from the opening returns – but Holst doesn’t simply repeat it exactly as before. He introduces a new, fast, ‘choppy’ idea played by the strings, as well as using the ideas we heard earlier.
Listen carefully at the very end – just before the last two chords, there is a very short, very low solo played by the contrabassoon. This is the lowest member of the woodwind family, and it is so low that it nearly goes beyond what the human ear can hear!
Jupiter: The Bringer of Jollity
In the middle of this piece, we hear the very famous hymn tune ‘I vow to thee my country.’ Holst didn’t intend it to become a hymn when he wrote it – he adapted it for the words in 1921. Surrounding this steady melody are a variety of exuberant sections; it’s a musical party with lots of dancing, some joyous outbursts, and ‘I vow to thee my country’ providing some calm in the middle. These sections are brought together by the fact that they start with the same three notes (which also happen to be the first three notes of the Postman Pat theme tune!). When you listen to the movement, see if you can spot how many times those three notes appear.
Saturn: The Bringer of Old Age
Saturn sits between earthly things (war, peace, messages and happiness) and the realm of the spiritual (magic and mysticism with Uranus and Neptune). The music is eerie and slightly weird, alternating between two chords which never quite settle. Listen carefully for the double basses (the lowest member of the string family) playing a low melody near the beginning. It is unusual for these instruments to be given a melody and adds to the strange feel of the music. Further on, a slow march starts, reminiscent of a funeral march. The music grows to a gigantic climax, where you’ll hear bells ringing out, before resolving into beautiful, glowing, contented music with fast, floating patterns provided by the harps and flutes.
Uranus: The Magician
Uranus storms in, with the brass instruments playing four notes as loudly as they can. These are then played quicker by the tuba and euphonium, and faster again by the timpani. These four notes represent Holst’s name in musical letters, though he had to use different languages to make this workd! Here is his name with the four letters matching musical pitches in bold: Gustav Holst
G and A are the names of notes in English. S in Russian is the note Eb, and H in German is the note Bb. So, the four notes which make up his name are G, Eb, A, Bb. Why do you think Holst decided to put his musical name into a piece of music called ‘The Magician’?
These four notes keep appearing in the music – how many times can you spot them? After the opening, the bassoon section is featured and the music gets going with a slightly galumphing march, which sometimes sounds like a dance. Listen out for a massive climax, featuring the organ. The organist pulls out all of the stops, to make as loud a sound as possible, and slides their fingers all the way up the keys, which is quite a spectacular sound! After this the piece fades away, ending very quietly.
Neptune: The Mystic
The final movement, Neptune, is quiet throughout. It drifts along with a sequence of beautiful, strange sounds. There’s lots of delicately swirling sounds from the upper strings, harps and celeste, whilst the other instruments play long notes in the background.
Then, magically, voices are heard halfway through. It’s an offstage female choir – which must have been totally unexpected in the first performance! They sing a beautiful, long high note, anchoring the music at that point. Towards the end, they sing a repeated pattern, which they continue until after the entire orchestra has finished. They keep going and are asked to move away from the stage as they sing, their sound ‘to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance.’ This must have been the first fade out ever written in music!
Other pieces you might like by Gustav Holst
St Paul’s Suite for String Orchestra
Four short folk music inspired pieces, with different characters, written for the school students he taught.
Beni Mora
Holst suffered from neuritis and asthma, and was advised to take a holiday for his health. He went to Algeria, and was captivated by the folk music he heard there. This piece was inspired by that trip.