Original subtitles

This is a man who cycled into the Sahara desert.

This is a man who lived in a street of brothels in Algiers.

Who taught himself Sanskrit.

who was distressed by the words used to his most famous tune, I vow to thee my

country, because they were the opposite of what he believed, who instinctively

understood the violence of mechanized warfare, and who had an absolute horror

of the inevitability of old age and death.

Holt's most famous work, The Planets, is the most performed and recorded piece of

English music in the repertoire. Over 200 different international recordings.

But there are still people who turn their noses up at The Planets. Well,

more fool them, I say. It's one of the most original and extraordinary and

brilliant things in English music.

Full stop.

And the fact that it is also very popular really shouldn't blind us to

this. It is so inventive all the way through. This is a mind at the absolute

full stretch, an extraordinary mind at full stretch.

For instance, the beautiful, unbelievable sounds of these atonal

chords swinging backwards and forwards at Saturn. This is something completely

unlike what any English composer had attempted before then, and actually

isn't very much like what any continental composer was doing at the

time either.

And maybe it's that old thing about custom staling something's infinite

variety, but maybe we need to just stand back from this piece and forget the fact

that we know it well, or many of us do, and just listen to it afresh. And that's

been my experience over the last few years, and thinking, God, this is an

astonishing piece.

the trouble is that his most famous music has been used and abused so often

that we no longer have a clear sight either of what holst originally intended

or of his greatness as a composer

I love

Gustavus von Holst was born in Cheltenham in 1874, less than 20 miles

from where his lifelong friend Rafe Vaughan Williams had been born only two

years earlier, in Gloucestershire in the Cotswolds.

but the myth of an idyllic rural england was not something which inspired holst

for him the english countryside much though he loved it was more akin to

thomas hardy unforgiving harsh midwinter bleak

Thank you.

The Holst family had come from Riga in the early 19th century when Riga was

part of Russia.

The family was actually German, and two brothers had actually bought the title

from the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, patron of Mozart.

So the Gustav Holst family originates from that same branch where my family

comes from.

My part of the family then became nobility in 1789, the year of the French

Revolution, given by Joseph II.

Just because they had property in Russia, and it was one of the things to

keep it in Russia, they had to have the title.

So they went down to Joseph II and said, we need the title, can we buy it?

This is the seal that Johann Valentin and Heinrich Christian got the two

brothers when they got their nobility.

And here in detail is the family crest.

which is also on my ring, with which you would seal important documents, for

instance.

But then the family split, and Matthias, their cousin, who had spent some time as

a composer at the court of St. Petersburg, emigrated finally to

England, probably for economic reasons.

It was really quite a musical family.

Holst's grandfather was a composer.

His father Adolf gave piano lessons at the house in Pitville Terrace.

One of his pupils, Clara, became his wife, Holst's mother.

But Adolf was also an organist and choir master, and the sound of church choirs

in the nearby cathedral in Gloucester and in All Saints Church in Cheltenham,

where the young Gustavus was christened, must have been the earliest sounds he

would have heard.

Bow down thine ear, O Lord, hear me, for

I am poor and needy. Through my

humble supplication, Lord,

give ear and acceptation. Be

merciful unto me.

And it was no accident that his first job when he was only 17 was as an

organist in the heart of the Cotswolds.

Most Sundays he would walk the 15 miles from Cheltenham to the little church at

Wickwissington.

He happened to be organist there because he was offered the job and he needed the

money as well as the experience. It was his first professional job.

When I say needed the money, you may not think that four pounds a year was much.

but you have to remember that money went further in those days.

The experience was very, very useful to him.

My father had been to Cheltenham Grammar School, where he had soon realised that

music was to be his life.

The thing that impressed him most, of course, was that he was so good at

playing the piano.

Quite astonishingly good.

Not a bit like a schoolboy of that age.

Here we are in Hohl's birthplace museum with Hohl's own piano here.

It's not the best musical instrument.

This has a very light touch.

So it would have meant that he could easily play the piano. He was a good

pianist.

But the problem would have been for him was the heavy touches of the German

pianos. Because Hohl suffered from neuritis...

which meant that he was very weak down his right-hand side.

He couldn't play on the piano, which had a heavy touch, and so this instrument

was found for him.

He also tried to learn the violin, and his father, being a good musician

himself, was determined to get him into one of the music colleges in London, in

spite of the fact that the young Holst already suffered quite badly from

asthma.

When he was a schoolboy, he was called Sausage.

He was so hopeless at games, you know. I mean, at school, you can be good at

games and enhance the honour of your school and you're held in very high

regard.

If you're good at studies and you pass exams and enhance the honour of your

school academically, you're a swat and nobody wants to know.

And so because he was no good at games, he was generally disparaged by

everybody. They just called him sausage, good for nothing, you know, can't play

cricket, can't play rugger. And that was how he got that name.

His father made him take up the trombone as a remedy against asthma.

The boy could hardly breathe at times and his father thought that playing the

trombone, where you've got to get your breath right up into your lungs and play

this instrument, was good for him. So he became quite competent as a trombonist.

Now a trombonist doesn't play as much as other instruments like the violins, so

there's quite long rests when he could sit around and listen to what the other

instruments in the orchestra were doing.

and he said he learnt orchestration from the inside out.

But he had neuritis in his hands always and that was always difficult for all

the writing.

He was quite frail.

But of course, with his terrible health and terrible eyesight, he could hardly

recognize his own family from the distance of a few yards.

He applied for Trinity College and was turned down.

And then he got into the Royal College of Music. But in order to do that, he

had to take lessons in harmony and counterpoint.

And then I think he just sort of, once he got into the college, he put that

aside and started to do his own thing.

In fact, there's a wonderful anecdote some years later when Imogen herself was

going to the Royal College of Music.

She told me that she vividly remembered her first day when she left home to

travel to the college.

She walked down the garden path.

And Holst stood in the doorway behind her when she got to the garden gate.

He shouted out, Remember, whatever you do, never open a textbook on harmony.

It was in 1895, that's the year he got his scholarship, that he first met

Vaughan Williams.

And they immediately became great friends and remained great friends right

up to the time my father died.

And from the very early times when they were at college, they got into the habit

of meeting as often as possible and playing through their compositions to

each other

half-written stage and criticizing them and that was i think possibly the most

helpful thing in music that happened to my father throughout his whole

life but it was at morley college in the slums behind waterloo station

that he finally found his musical home

Morley College was formed primarily to give education to the working classes.

It was very important for Holst, as he was once director of music

here. Initially, I believe, the Morley trustees wanted to appoint Ralph Vaughan

Williams, but he actually recommended Gustav Holst because Vaughan Williams

felt he didn't have enough time.

So Holst proceeded to do a lecture on the horrors of the bagpipe music by

which the trustees felt this was a great thing and so appointed him.

When he first came here he taught music history but it was his enthusiasm that

seemed to get the students imagination and so he was absolutely keen to do

these large projects, singing projects of various works and it didn't matter

whether you had no talent at all or you felt you had no talent at all, it was

important for him that people were making music. His philosophy was that

anyone could sing.

The large choir is called the Can't Sing Choir. It's a great space for people to

come after work to have a go at singing. Perhaps they've never sung before.

Perhaps they haven't given it a go since they were little because perhaps maybe

when they were young they weren't allowed to sing.

Beautiful. That's a really lovely sound.

He was very involved in socialist reform during this time. He used to attend

regularly lectures by Judge Bernard Shaw, as well as William Morris, and

also conduct the Hamasist Socialist Choir. My father was influenced by

Morris as a socialist.

He did care very deeply.

for some of the things that Morris wanted to happen.

It's interesting reading them now because, of course, after all these

years, some of them are happening.

And Morris, I remember, had said at about this time, when my father was in

his house, that he wanted people who did hard manual

labor, coal miners and rail women, to have very good

so that it made up for the fact that they were doing really very

unpleasant jobs to earn their living.

The Morley Chamber Choir also encapsulates what Holst wanted to do.

People are from all walks of life and so within the choir we have students, we

have costume makers, we have people who are producers, we have a barrister, we

have a cleaner.

So Holst was very much into the idea of socialism and music being for

everyone. He wanted to give people, enrich their lives.

and politically and artistically. And in the early 1890s, he used to deliver the

socialist work on his bicycle, sometimes with his trombone hanging out the back

in a rucksack.

And he was one of the few composers who worked in the East End of London at a

time when he could really have done without it because he was so hard

-pressed teaching at Morley. He believed in it, that it was a worthwhile thing to

do. He brought the working class in, so-called, the music of Bach.

For him, success was irrelevant.

What mattered was that you did your job. If you were a composer, you composed

whether you were successful at it or not.

whether you appreciate it or not, but you should do what you want to do.

Now, this singles him out very differently from all the other people

who have become famous and well-known. It almost consigns him to oblivion.

If you say Morley College now, people are used to the very high standard of

music making that goes on.

But they were real beginners in those days.

Some of them couldn't read their notes.

He tried to teach them.

And some of them really didn't make an awfully nice sound on their instruments.

I remember there was one woman who had a paralyzed right arm.

And she had... play the violin by leaning against the wall with

her paralyzed arm and moving the violin to and fro.

But my father, yes, don't frown, it was all right, because my father put her

among other violinists who could play, and so she did very little damage.

And of course it was the making of her life.

And it was primarily because of his health that in 1903 he set off for

Algeria and the Sahara with 50 pounds given him by Vaughan Williams.

And there he lived in the street of the Oulad Nails, the street of the so-called

dancing girls.

Bye.

what now

This whole idea of using repetitive patterns, particularly repetitive

rhythmic patterns, to create a hypnotic, mesmeric, meditative effect, something

that circles round rather than travelling in a straight line.

This is something that he was onto way in advance.

The minimalists, John Adams or Steve Reich, Philip Glass.

And again, you have composers today like Harrison Birtwistle and Mark Anthony

Turnage. Hollywood.

John Williams' film scores wouldn't be John Williams' film scores without the

example of the way Holst particularly writes for The Wind and the Brass.

Wonderfully clear ears and amazing abilities to recreate just even the

simplest sounds and textures.

That, surely, it has to be Holst. Holst is the grandfather of all this sort of

thing.

And in his choral writing, especially about death, he casts a long shadow over

Walton, Britain, tip it with some of the most heartfelt coral writing ever

profound yet utterly simple

Some people say, oh, did you take two whole years to write one work?

But the poor man was still earning his living teaching three schools and having

spent all day in a school, would then get onto a bus and go to Morley College

and teach his grown-up amateurs, choir and orchestra, composition

classes, in the evening.

And the only time he had for composing then was at weekends and in the month of

August.

You'll remember that he was an ex-trombone player, that he'd begun

earning his living playing trombone.

so that bandsmen's music was very much part of his working life.

I think it's the beginning of his real individual style of

writing, because he'd only recently grown out of writing Bad Imitation

Wagner, and with the influence of Purcell, one of his very favourite

composers, and the influence of the folk songs that he'd learnt when Vaughan

Williams collected them,

you get this beginning of the genuine host.

I remember he told me he used to borrow Russian books, not in Russian, from his

friend Vaughan Williams, and he'd prop them up, and then he'd get so used to

the bits where he wasn't wanted that he'd read, and when he could recognize a

cue going on, he'd raise his trombone and come in exactly the right moment.

His chief job, when he began, however, was playing in the music hall, end of

the pier bands.

Brighton, Eastbourne, which is a bit grim, three shows a day, but he probably

played for many of the great music hall stars in the East End at the end of the

19th century.

But if she turns her head like so, something doing, don't you know?

Every little movement tells a tale.

If you're happy, tell to you all the

wonderful things that his first wife goes to do.

Don't stop crying.

If you do, you are a threat.

Grab him by the whiskers, swing him round the room and say, is your first

wife happy?

And it was billed as a kind of Hungarian orchestra.

And they were all ordinary English musicians, but they were ordered in the

interval when they walked around and had a drink at the bar, they had to talk in

thick foreign accents so that people would think they were real Hungarians.

And they liked this. It was all a bit of a laugh because they're all just young

chaps, really, you know.

And of course, Holst, with his name at that time, Gustavus von Holst, sounded

very Central European.

And I think somebody said to him, with a name like that, you're going to go a

long way in British music.

The problem for all English composers at the end of the 19th century was the

complete dominance of the German symphonic sound.

Brahms, for example, and particularly Wagner.

So the discovery by Cecil Sharp, Vaughan Williams and Holst of a huge treasure

house of English folk songs was of crucial importance.

a woman called lucy broadwood published the first ever collection of british

folk songs the way the melodies were constructed the irregular rhythms the

modal harmonies it was all like a breath of fresh air

As a composer, you do wonder, what language shall I speak in?

And I think when you first start, you're naturally going to copy other people

until you find your own language in which you can work.

And I think Focus On gave them a chance to think, oh, this is something we can

actually start to look at.

It was in the air, you know, this sense of preserving things.

The National Trust was founded in 1895, for instance, and the rich vein of old

English carols, not the Victorian variety, mostly German, of course, but

from Northumberland, from East Anglia and from Cornwall, was profoundly

important for Holst.

It was an attempt to hold on to things before they vanished in the new

industrial age.

but it wasn't so much preservation as complete reinvention.

Ironically, it was his discovery of his own language that helped spread his

music around the globe.

You have to think of Hulse as part of an alternative, anti-establishment,

underground culture.

He was a socialist long before it was fashionable, a vegetarian and someone

who was fascinated by other ways of life, particularly the Indian.

He believed that one should be interested in other religions, not just

our own, other mythologies, other poetry, the world of China, India,

Finland, Scandinavia generally, and that they could actually offer us something.

Instead of us offering them Christianity, perhaps we could learn

from them.

oddly enough of all places cheltenham where he was born probably encouraged

him to develop this world view it was full of people who had worked in the

indian civil service or the army and retired to cheltenham from india

cheltenham was very famous for its particular quality of its curries that

were served at the promenade so there was definitely an indian background to

cheltenham there would be people who had been to india knew it very very well

But Holst was interested not merely in the philosophy of Hinduism, but in its

sense of ritual and dance, which was often reflected in his own ballet music.

He even learned Sanskrit and wrote many major works based on the Ramayana,

Mahabharata and the Rig Veda poems, works which were central to Hindu

philosophy.

This poem invokes the God that will guide us along the roads of this world

to the roads of the next.

Perhaps the most important teaching job Holst undertook, again, you see, he

needed to earn money to be able to find the time to compose, was here at St

Paul's Girls' School on Brook Green in Hammersmith, along the road from where

he had conducted the Hammersmith Socialist Choir.

And, of course, he wrote music for the school orchestra, the St Paul Suite, of

course, and right at the very end of his life, the Brook Green Suite.

When Holst taught here, the school, a girls' school, was new.

It had opened only ten years before, in 1904, but that in itself was also

something quite revolutionary, and it was Frances Grey, the first High

Mistress. It was her inspiration to actually appoint somebody as director of

music who was really new on the scene, not just somebody who was in the

establishment. Of course, that was high Edwardian England in those days.

very establishment and very, well, fixed in its moral standings. But she somehow

saw in this young man, he was barely 30, in fact, yes, 31 when he was appointed,

somebody who could be, first of all, a great educator, because he'd already

given the theory out that he wanted music to be enjoyed by all, not just the

elitist, the way it is sometimes seen.

And Francis Gray appointed him.

to be this leading light, avant-garde composer.

Almost inevitably, I vow to thee my country has become virtually the school

anthem. But I sometimes wonder if they have the faintest notion how much Holst

hated those words.

It was useful for him to have the job at St Paul's because it paid his rent.

I mean, it was a job to him.

I don't think people made a great fuss of him. As a composer, he wasn't feted

the way composers are these days.

He didn't give the impression of being a great composer.

He was much loved in the school.

Everyone knew him as Gussie.

And we saw him around, but...

You didn't have the feeling that you were, even to the extent that you have

with Vaughan Williams, that you were in the presence of someone rather special.

Well, this is the so-called Holst Room at St Paul's Girls' School, which Gustav

Holst designed for himself.

And it was in this room that he would have written nearly all his works,

especially The Planets, as we know, was begun in this room. But thereby hangs a

very interesting tale.

Holst always wrote directly for the orchestra.

Not piano first, then orchestrate later.

But because of his crippling neuritis, he actually had a pen strapped to his

middle finger to enable him to write at all.

He had two young ladies from the school, Nora Day and Valli Lasker, waiting at

the other end of the room, as it were.

As soon as a page of the score was finished, they would quickly make a

piano reduction and try bits out for him, so that he could hear what he had

written. I found the actual score here in a cupboard a few years back.

And so The Planets was in fact first performed in this room.

Four hands, one piano.

The school does still possess a very few of the manuscripts.

This is very interesting, because this is what everybody in the world knows as

the St Paul's Suite, which, of course, he wrote for the senior girls in the

school, a very difficult virtuoso piece of a string orchestra.

But it's called the Suite in C.

And, in fact, I had no idea that it was called Suite in C originally.

It's exactly the score that we know. And there are dozens and dozens of

alterations to his original, extremely neat manuscript.

Cuts, bar numbers changed, extra voices added in. And this room was kept

superheated for him at the weekends because of his arm pains.

It was kept superheated and he was fed and watered by his wife and daughter, as

far as we know, who would see him through his work until about tea time,

sensible hour on a Sunday afternoon, five o'clock, off he'd toddle back to

home round the corner.

But it's the sound of that suite that is so shocking. On the one hand, familiar,

almost predictable string writing, and suddenly something altogether

unfamiliar, 30 years before Benjamin Britten wrote like that.

Where on earth does that sound come from?

Holst used to go on long walking expeditions into the English countryside

with his friend Vaughan Williams.

Ironically, neither of them much cared for these walks, Vaughan Williams

because of his bulk, Holst because of his very poor health.

But one day they came across the village of Thackstead in Essex and Holst went

into this enormous church and what should he see hanging there but the red

flag.

I think Helst found Thaxton instantly attractive.

It was a place which lots of London socialists, in fact, wandered through

with that great habit of walking in the countryside that was characteristic of

the early 20th century. Lots of people wandered into Thaxton and were instantly

hooked. It was a combination of the music, because even before Helst

arrived, there had been an attempt to revive a new kind of church music in the

parish church. The colour, decorating the church with banners.

hangings, new bits of furniture with decoration on them, and the beauty of

the services, an attempt to recreate an intense religious experience with

incense and processions.

It all came together in a heady mix, I think, for anyone who arrived, and with

the politics absolutely at the centre, because the sermons were almost always

political.

And the sermons were given, preached, by one of the most remarkable priests in

the early part of the 20th century, known as the Red Vicar, Conrad Noll.

His politics were very, for the day, very, very left-wing, almost bordering

on communism.

He introduced a red flag into the chancel, as well as a green one,

strangely enough.

The red flag at the time of some riots for social justice to, you know, the

church is backing you.

and the green one to show his support for what he felt was unfair treatment of

the Irish.

Holst at one point wanted to build a tennis court for his wife and daughter

and for their friends so that they could play tennis on a Sunday afternoon and he

lived in Monk Street and there was an adjoining small piece of land which was

suitable and so he applied to the farmer and said, you know, could I

buy this piece of land?

He was met with a stern refusal, Farmer believing that he was a German spy,

knowing of his relationship with Conrad Noll, who he completely disapproved of,

disapproved of popish ways, absolutely refused point blank to sell him the

piece of land, and declared something along the lines of, you know, if you

think I'm going to see Beelzebub on the one hand and the Pope of Rome on the

other playing lawn tennis on my land on the Sabbath, you know, no fear.

At the time, the leading lights, the church wardens and so on, had the front

seats in the nave.

The workers and the poorer people were behind, and he changed all that.

And so you could say he put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the

humble and meek.

He was a militant socialist and thought that at times eggs might have to be

broken. And he sees himself as a great anti-imperialist. He wants to see a

commonwealth of nations across the world.

And we find in Noel's writings about God, continual use of musical language,

the Trinity, which for him symbolized the unification of nations, both being

separate but also one whole.

He describes as God being a chord, a rich chord, much more resonant than a

single note.

And we find him talking about the implementation of the will of God on

earth being the work of God's orchestra.

Music and song and dance in particular have been part of man's social life and

ritual life for centuries.

We're talking about 1910.

The revival of Morris dancing was just beginning, and it was part of the arts

and crafts movement of William Morris and Gustav Holst.

People have said to me, Why are you dancing in church?

What is this Morris dancing?

Isn't it pagan?

And I said, what better way of showing your skills than to dance

if you are a believer in front of the altar of your God?

That, again, is a huge legacy that we were given by Gustav Holst.

People not unkindly referred to him as Mr.

Fon or the German.

Baxter became a publishing center.

They set up a press that produced tracts, tracts against imperialism,

tracts against usury, a new vision of church and politics to the nation as a

whole. So he makes a great distinction between the flag of St. George as the

flag of the English and the Union Jack, which is a token of imperialism, which

is not to be allowed in the church, is something that is to be associated only

with the authoritarian and nasty side of the Church of England's association with

the state.

At the same time, although he's a Catholic in his religion, he can't stand

the Pope for that reason. The Pope is a fascist.

He would oppose any formal celebration of Empire, and indeed on Empire Day he

would pin notices to the church door announcing that at noon the bell will

toll for the victims of imperialism. And that became a very sore spot with many

of his critics and led immensely to the Battle of the Flags.

And this reflects the fact that during the First World War, Noel had taken up

hanging the flags of the Allied forces in the church.

At the time, one of those was Ireland.

And by the...

At the end of the war, possibly slightly afterwards, he'd replaced the Irish

green flag by the tricolour of Sinn Fein.

More and more people rolled into Thaxton, and by the evening, there were

about 3,000 protesters who gathered for a meeting at the Moot Hall, or the

Guildhall in the main street, to protest.

He writes an extraordinary letter to his wife that evening, who wasn't present in

the town, saying that it's a very serious situation, he's heard rumours

that the Black and Tans might be sending assassination squads over from Ireland,

but that nonetheless, he's going to see it out.

And the importance of Gustav Holst in all of this, because of his obvious

sympathy for what Conrad Noll was trying to achieve, after all, Holst was a

friend of that other militant socialist, George Bernard Shaw, cannot be

overestimated. And perhaps the most emblematic example of the relationship

between Holst and Conrad Noll was the story of the song known as The General

Dance.

Oh my love,

sing, oh my love

found this poem, a medieval poem, in which Christ's relationship with the

world is encapsulated in the metaphor of the dance, and read it one time from the

pulpit. He then ended up speaking to Hulse about it, showed him the original

tune, which the both dismissed as not up to much, and Hulse took it away to

compose a new one.

A copy of the poem was displayed in the church, and some of those opposed to

Noel complained to the bishop of this, saying, the secular poem.

was attached to the wall of the church, and it noted great pleasure in solemnly

informing the bishop that this secular poem was in fact a widely used part of

Anglican worship already, and that he would take it down if he insisted, but

perhaps the bishop might like to reconsider, which he duly did.

So, at Whitsun festivals, when he brought down singers from Morley College

and St Paul's Girls' School, and at the gatherings of the Morris dancers from

all over East Anglia, which took place regularly in Thackstead, it was typical

of Holst that he should take something really quite workaday, that would be

known by all the agricultural workers thereabouts, for instance, and then

transform it into something altogether magical.

We'll be right back.

always enjoyed receiving commissions, especially those more associated with

the working class.

He always wanted to make himself useful.

So when a commission came along to write something for all those amateur colliery

and factory brass bands, he jumped at it and wrote what became a competition test

piece for the National Brass Band Festivals.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's very, very important to remember that at the time Holst began writing,

modern music, for the vast majority of people who cared about it in this

country, was Elgar.

Maybe also Richard Strauss.

For an audience coming along and hearing the beginning of the planets, it's

difficult for us to sense just how extraordinarily new this must have

sounded. You just take a look at the score, and every single element on the

first page, Holst is asking each instrument to do something which is...

quite unlike what anybody would have expected at the time. First of all,

there's this famous rhythm.

And there you are, he's got the timpani playing it, fair enough, but he asks

them to play it with wooden sticks instead of the usual sponge sticks, so

it's a dry, harsh, sharp sound.

Then he asks the violins to play the same rhythm, col legno, that's turn the

bow round and hit it.

with the back of the bow, with the wood. So you get this very imprecise tonal

sound with this clicking, this sort of skeletal, bony kind of sound.

Then he asks something even more extraordinary of the harps.

Harps normally, in Romantic music, meant sort of liquid, airy sounds, but what

Hulst is going for here is something incredibly metallic.

He asks for them... Now, one thing you really can't do on a harp, and it's

almost impossible on the piano, is rapid, repeated notes.

So he has each harp dovetail. So one of them goes...

And the other one goes... So they overlap each other so that the ear hears

something that's technically impossible, which is two harps going... And it would

have been a very dry, metallic, bell-like sound. Not the kind of thing

you normally associate with a harp.

Put all these together, add something else, a quiet roll on the gong sustained

in the background.

Gongs were not unknown in the music of the time, but they were usually for that

big J. Arthur Rank effect, or the quiet death...

chord at the end of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony but here Holst asks

for a very very quiet so that you're just aware of this sort of sound almost

like radio interference in the background that's not it's not just the

pure sound of this is so extraordinary as well um it's the tempo or rather the

meter Holst asks this music for the beginning of Mars to be played in five

four five beats to the bar and yet it's clearly a march who marches in five

beats to a bar It's all part of this extraordinary inhumanity that he's

trying to create, the sound of something mechanical, something inhuman marching

here. And 5-4, things in five beats at the bar, were still pretty unusual in

English music, even in 1914.

My grandfather, who was a... semi-professional choral conductor,

remembered going round about there to a performance of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique

Symphony, which has a movement in five beats to the bar in it, rather famously.

The conductor didn't know what to do with this, so he opted for four plus

one, like this. One, two, three, four, one. One, two, three, four, one, one.

And you can imagine the kind of performance that came out of that.

He finished Mars in the spring and early summer.

1914 and then went on to the other movements during the next two years he

said you know I don't think there's any hope of this being performed in wartime

it's such a vast orchestra he knew it would be very expensive but a marvelous

thing happened in 1918 one of his friends was the composer and patron

of music Balfour Gardner And Balfour gave him a present

of a rehearsal with the new Queen's Hall Orchestra

and Adrian Bolter, conductor.

My great-uncle, Balfour Gardiner, who was a bit of a maverick, was in a way

the sort of fairy godfather to Holst in many ways. I mean, Balfour...

put on these amazingly prescient series of concerts at the Queen's Hall in 1912,

1913, 1914 of contemporary English music. I mean, nobody had done that

before with the LSO.

He had a certain amount of private means himself. He paid for the whole damn

thing.

And he allowed composers of the day to suddenly to have a platform and a voice

there at the Queen's Hall.

And it really put English music suddenly...

on on the map in a way that never done before um and then uh just before

gustav holst was sent off to work for the ymca as education officer in the

near east he came to balfour with the score of the planets and said this is it

and baffle said i'm going to give you a performance of this

One of the characteristics, I think, of both Holst and Vaughan Williams is that

they were distrustful of industrial capitalism and what it brought.

Both of them recoiled from this mechanization, not just in war, but in

general. And I think he didn't like the sort of brutal mechanism, both in its

manifestation in people's lives and the actual sounds it made,

evocation of a dreadful mechanical slaughtering process an awful

industrialized complex where people are reduced to sort of dots by the sheer

power and noise and brutality of the machines

of

course the planets which was written in this in this very room the holster most

of it written in this very holster um

...is more than just a prophetic piece. I think it does have obvious prophetic

elements. But it's a very profound study of the nature of humanity altogether.

He knew that there were forces at work to crush the human spirit.

You know, that imperialism... Many people would have claimed that the

imperialist project was a moral one... ...was an educative one, a civilizing

one... ...but Holst as a socialist would no doubt have encountered the idea.

that's much more prevalent now, that basically it was an economic project,

and that the moral pretensions were disguised for this.

And I think he would have seen how precisely those kind of acquisitive,

grasping, greedy forces were the ones that had created the dark, satanic

mills. I'd never heard his music before, and of course in those days it was very

modern, and to us, full of discords.

And when we did the rehearsal, I must say,

I didn't like it very much because it sounded all discords, as if everybody

was singing out of tune.

But when we came to the concert itself, and I heard the whole thing in toto, so

to speak, it was absolutely magnificent.

I then realized I sort of appreciated it. At the same time, this little man, I

did wonder how on earth he ever came to write anything like Mars, for instance,

which is one of the noisiest bits of music I believe has ever been written.

how he could have produced that.

We are.

Thank you.

My father had only one attempt at writing film music, something called The

Bells, which has long since disappeared, as far as I know.

But his younger brother, Emil, had quite a career in Hollywood, where he was

known as Ernest Cossart, usually in small parts, but often with famous

actors such as Ronald Reagan.

Come in, come in.

I'd like to talk to you for a little while, Mr. Monaghan.

Is Randy here?

I don't want her to see me looking like this. I just want to talk to you.

She's upstairs.

I was just puttering around here.

Never know what to do with myself some days.

When Ma was alive, we'd sit and talk.

How about a cup of coffee?

No, thanks. The constable gave me some coffee.

Well,

I didn't have to go there and get drunk. No, you didn't. To tell you the truth,

son, I've been meaning to talk to you for some time.

You won't need to.

I gave myself a talking to this morning when I woke up in jail with three other

guests of the town.

I want a job, Mr Monaghan. Can you get me a job in the railroad?

I've got no place on the section gang, Drake.

I guess I will have some coffee, please.

I think Holst had wanted to do something during the war, but of course, with his

terrible health and terrible eyesight, he was useless for the army.

So he volunteered to do work amongst the troops, kind of social musical work, and

he applied to the YMCA.

They asked him would he mind going over to Salonika and Constantinople to do

some musical work just to boost the morale of the troops that were there.

And he felt that the von sounded too German and he couldn't

work for the British army with a German sounding name and that's when he dropped

it. And I since also established that he had to pay a lot of money for it.

And he wasn't very happy about it at all. It wasn't that he could just say,

I'm not using my phone anymore.

So he was again asked. First of all, they had to buy it. And secondly, they

had to buy it again, not to use it any longer.

And while he was traveling over there, the armistice was signed. And so the war

was over.

So when he got over there, there were thousands of troops hanging about with

really nothing to do.

So this was an opportunity for him to organise choirs, orchestras. It was like

Morley College, but over in Bulgaria.

He wasn't trying to write music to be a kind of serious composer, to write great

masterpieces that are going to last for posterity.

He was not interested in honours, he was not interested in awards, he didn't want

to go to smart cocktail parties with a lot of other fancy people.

If music needed to be written for a choir or a Whitsun festival or whatever,

he would write it. Or some idea he had inside of himself that he would like to

write, that is what he did.

He was also completely lacking in musical snobbishness.

All music making was the same to him, so it was quite natural for him one evening

he might be conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in the Queen's Hall

in the professional concert.

The next morning he might be conducting a gang of schoolgirls at St Paul's

Girls' School, and then in the evening trying to encourage some amateurs at

Morley College.

It was all the same. He didn't distinguish between them and say, oh,

this is more important than that.

Perhaps think of Vaughan Williams as a symphonist.

We think of Britten as an opera composer.

And Holst did a bit of this and a bit of that, whatever took his interest.

But there's a difference between the general public and musicians.

For instance, he only wrote one brass band piece, the Moorside Suite, but it

is a classic of brass band writing.

and held in very high regard by brass band players.

Audiences may hear or even sing in the bleak midwinter and not know who it's

actually by.

They know it's good music, they sing it at Christmas.

They don't necessarily associate it with the name Gustav Holst.

He was particularly influenced by places, Hammersmith, where the river

goes past the bustling life in the markets there, and Egdon Heath,

wonderful evocation of that part of Dorset where he liked to roam across the

countryside. And I think that was part of his philosophy in a way, that

regardless of the human life that goes on on Egdon Heath in Dorset, the land

itself remains the same, would remain there for centuries.

will be there regardless of what we do.

We come and go.

My father had become a great admirer and acquaintance of Thomas Hardy, for whom

Egerton Heath was an area not only of inspiration for several of his novels,

but a place of witchcraft and superstition, and in winter a no-man's

land that was very, very bleak.

Sadly, Hardy died before the first performance, which was greeted with

complete indifference, even a few boos.

For much of his life, Holst was convinced he was a failure.

Much of his music was not performed professionally, or when performed, more

or less instantly forgotten, some of it not published even today.

He had high hopes, but he failed to win various new music competitions he'd

entered, especially with his early opera Sita, the influence of Sanskrit and

Hinduism again.

And so he turned for consolation to the study of something called Theosophy, a

philosophy he had learned from his stepmother.

Theosophy was founded in the year Holst was born by a Russian immigrant called

Helena Blavatsky.

It was a doctrine she claimed to have learned from a monk in Tibet.

It became a huge thing. It was very much anti-establishment feeling. It was anti

-church, the established church, that is.

And she was also interested in phrenology.

Phrenology was the study of the bumps on people's heads, and you can actually

still find porcelain heads with bumps on it so that people could sort of work out

a basic thesis. But obviously, mostly, it was...

feeling people's bumps and deciding what it meant. I mean, the phonology that

Host had in 1892, the year that he knew he had failed to get into a music

college and therefore felt a complete failure,

wondering what his destiny was going to be.

And what was his destiny?

How was his life going to unfold?

What was the nature of himself?

Because he had fallen into one of these terrible depressions that he was liable

to have from time to time.

It was only in desperation, in one of his moments of terrible desperation in

1913, that his friend Clifford Bax, who was another theosophist, a poet and a

dramatist, suggested to him that he investigate astrology.

The astrological map... is a picture of the self at birth and the

way it develops it will develop according to your character character is

destiny and the astrological map that he prepared for himself fortified

him in his work and that what he was doing was the only thing that he could

do so he went to astrology to find himself at the moment when he thought

he'd lost everything And there at the beginning of the sixth movement, Uranus

the magician, we actually have Holst with a rather crafty little bit of code

writing, showing that he himself is the magician. This is who the magician is,

it's me. And the way he does that is with this famous little motif.

Now that's G, E flat, A, B.

But in German notation, which of course has to be more complicated than English,

that's G, S, for E flat, E double S, A, H,

which is what they call our B.

G, S, A, H are the musical letters of the

name Gustav Holst. And in fact, the first and last letters, of course, are

G, H, his initials. So there he is saying, it's me, I'm the magician.

the creator of this astonishing Technicolor score.

Composers are magicians.

It's quite obvious they are magicians because they conjure things out of

nowhere and write and construct monuments in sound which you can't

touch.

This is a magical process and most people don't understand it.

So you can understand poetry, you can understand painting, but many people

can't understand or have any feeling about what do composers do.

The planets music, those seven pieces for large orchestra.

Adding the names of the planets to the titles of the movements was very much an

afterthought.

But considered astrologically, which Holst undoubtedly did, there is a

specific plan.

And the planets describe aspects of human nature.

Perhaps a journey from the brutality, the mechanization of man, as in Mars.

towards the enlightenment in which a buddhist a hindu such as holst himself

believed the mystery of the self in a mysterious and infinite universe

that is what he tells in that final movement called neptune

And then on the great day, we all assembled in the manager's office, and

we were told to stand up when Mr. Holtz came in. He was a small man with very

thick lens glasses, and my impression was he did everything at the double. He

sort of rushed about.

And for Neptune, we really were supposed to be voices in the far distance.

I think we were supposed to be mermaids.

And we weren't seen. We sang behind the stage, at the back.

And we just, we didn't sing words, we just sang to ah.

And as it finishes, towards the end, the voices get quieter and quieter and they

die away and that's the end of the whole work.

And what happened was we slowly walked out of the building while someone very,

very slowly closed the door.

He was never the same after the accident way back in 1923 when he fell off the

podium in Reading.

He never really recovered from that.

He had the neuritis.

And in his last years, when he had the operation, it was called a duodenal

ulcer, which is what he was suffering from.

But then people have said to me, of course you know it was really cancer.

And some years ago, mentioning cancer wasn't done. One didn't speak of it. But

nowadays everybody speaks about cancer as a well-known disease that has to be

eradicated. But some kind of cancer of the abdomen he had, I think.

And everybody expected him to recover from the operation, but it was just too

much for his stamina, constitution.

He couldn't do it.

a last work then a farewell perhaps the lyric movement for viola written when he

was already very ill but not published until fourteen years after his death

I think he's a great inspirer to be intellectually curious and as open

-minded and as wide-reaching in what you explore as possible.

He clearly left a huge mark on Benjamin Britten. That extraordinary ability

Holst has to take even a familiar colour on the orchestra and make it sound like

a new discovery.

That's something Britten learnt from the wonderful text, quite un-English,

textual clarity that he has, almost analytical clarity.

He described one of his pieces as like being the sun rising on a frosty

morning.

It is that astonishing frosty clarity that you can hear in Hulse music.

But at the same time, lucidly simple.

from one who'd been his pupil at the age of eight and never forgot

the passionate way that he taught them to sing a very simple folk song with a

question and answer absolutely in rhythm and with very clear words

and that has been in her mind ever since she's an old woman now

and there are others like her who remember how he helped,

not only just teaching them to do music, but how

he helped without ever saying anything about it, how he helped them to realise

that music is a part of life that can't be done without.

No.