All language subtitles for Holst The Planets with Brian Cox, music BBC 720p EN SUB_Subtitles01.ENG

100 years ago,

Gustav Holst's masterpiece
The Planets

premiered at The Queen's Hall
in London.

It has since become a favourite on
the concert platform.

Holst's inspiration was more
astrological than astronomical.

When he composed the seven
movement suites,

Holst knew little of the physical
nature of the worlds he represented.

But thanks to a century
of discovery,

using space probes and rovers,

these are now worlds we've
photographed...

Worlds we've touched.

And, yet, Holst's music is
just as powerful today,

reminding us of the fragility of
humanity, adrift in the universe.

OK.

I've been working with
the BBC Symphony Orchestra

and conductor Ben Gernon,
exploring the latest science.

The images, I think, are very
powerful.

I'll show you an image in a moment

which I think is probably
my favourite image

in the history of
space exploration.

We want to discover if this new
knowledge

can deliver a fresh
insight into the music.

Tonight, at a special event at the
Barbican,

all seven movements will be
performed...

..this time, set to the backdrop of
the latest imagery of the planets.

CROWD APPLAUD

Holst's Planets were characterised
by their astrological

and mythological characters.

So, Mars, The Bringer Of War.
Venus, The Bringer Of Peace.

Neptune, The Mystic.

The aim of tonight's performance is
to explore how the music changes

if we listen today, with the luxury
of 100 years of scientific discovery

and, also, if we listen in today's
social and political context.

You see, composers like Holst
were involved in and contributed

to the political and intellectual
arguments of the day.

Holst was on the left of politics,
and he was also a spiritual man.

He was interested in eastern
philosophy,

he learned Sanskrit, and his music
had a strong Indian influence.

While he was writing The Planets,

during the First World War and just
before the First World War,

a time of great social, and economic
and geo-political instability,

his character, his interests,

and his political ideas are
reflected in The Planets.

Precisely how, of course,
is open to interpretation.

That is the point of great art.

But an interpretation
I find interesting

is that The Planets can be
seen as an intellectual journey,

informed by Holst's socialism,

and his attraction to eastern
mysticism.

In fact, the director Tony Palmer,
in his film on Holst,

wrote that in this context,
The Planets begins to make sense.

Not as an astrological chart,
a la Mystic Meg,

but as a pilgrim's progress

from the ferocity of industrial
capitalism, represented by Mars,

towards a karma of enlightenment,
represented by Neptune.

Now, tonight I'm not
interested in arguing for this,

or indeed, any other
particular interpretation.

What I am interested in is how
the work might suggest new ideas

when set in a 21st century context,

alongside the images and the
understanding of the solar system

to which we now have access.

This is a modern day spacecraft
picture of Mars.

Everywhere we look,
we see evidence of rivers.

So Mars, actually, was a world which
could have supported life

about 3 billion years ago.

Now we know that there's water on
Mars, there are minerals on Mars,

pretty much everything you need
to support human life

in a civilisation.

And so Mars becomes not a bringer
of war,

kind of a terrifying red
object in the sky,

but a bringer
of opportunity and hope.

I think it's really interesting.
There's a moment...

Actually, in the orchestra, if
we could just have a look, please.

And it's four bars before Figure 5.

And I'm wondering if we could just
soften this

to make this more hopeful?

This fanfare that we have
in the brass, instead of it being

da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-dee,
da-da-dum,

could it be
da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-dee?

So it's ever so slightly softer
and, maybe, as you were saying,

Brian, offers a sort of place for
hope.

Mars, as Holst would have known it,

was not a well-resolved planet,
if you like.

The photograph behind me is a
photograph taken by telescope

that was commissioned in 1917,

so, in fact, just after Holst had
written the piece.

What you see is a fuzzy blob.

You can see dark
markings on the surface.

And at the time, even reputable
astronomers mistook those markings

for, perhaps, signs of vegetation.

That image of Mars was dashed
when we went there with spacecraft.

The first spacecraft to fly past
was in 1965,

the Mariner 4 spacecraft.

And it sent back grainy
images of the surface.

President Lyndon Johnson, president
at the time, reflected.

He said, "It may be, it just may be,
that life as we know it,

"with its humanity, is more unique
than we may have thought."

If we move forward to today,
a fleet of spacecraft have visited.

The first thing we see is
a world of geological giants,

that you see a canyon spanning over
half the face of the planet,

which is called the Mariner Valley
after the Mariner spacecraft.

The Grand Canyon here on Earth would
fit into one of its side channels.

It's also a planet
of great volcanoes.

We have good evidence that there
were lakes,

possibly even oceans on Mars.

We've landed on Mars.

As I speak, there's a robot called
Curiosity,

which is exploring an old dry lake
bed.

It's found the signatures of organic
molecules,

it's found signatures of minerals

that only form in the presence of
standing water.

So we've built a picture up of Mars

that tells us that it was
Earth-like

perhaps three and a half
billion years ago,

with rivers and oceans and seas.

In a sense, it could have been a
living world.

Whether life began there,
we don't know.

But what's interesting is that this
changes our view of Mars again,

because a planet like Mars
that had water,

and still has water, becomes a
planet that has everything you need

to build a civilisation, to sustain
life, to sustain human beings.

So even if there weren't Martians
three and a half billion years ago,

even if there aren't still Martian
microbes today living sub-surface,

there will probably one day
be Martians,

because the Martians will be us.

Can we listen to Holst's Mars

and forget the deeply ingrained
20th century symbolism

of mechanised warfare?

Can we instead view Mars
with optimism?

Having survived the barbarism of the
20th century,

our technology and our rockets are
now free

to deliver perspective on our cosmic
isolation,

to provide a bridge to the future

where humanity is no longer confined
to a single world.

MUSIC: Mars, The Bringer of War
by Gustav Holst

CROWD APPLAUDS

I think the photographs of Holst
speak to me about the time.

So he was late-thirties,

40 or so when he wrote
The Planets. Mm-hmm.

But Holst didn't have so much
success as a composer

before he wrote this piece.

I often get the impression that he
was searching for something deeper

and more meaningful than his current
existence.

The First World War
was on the horizon.

He wanted to sign up, he couldn't
sign up, because he was ill.

He will have friends and colleagues
go and fight on the Front,

potentially never come home.

The historical context

within which this piece was written
is frightening.

We didn't know there
was an origin to the universe.

We didn't know how the sun shone,

so we didn't know about nuclear
physics.

So all those things that we almost
take for granted now...

..we'd not known.
That's what's interesting.

This is music from a time
when we had no idea

about our place
in the wider universe.

And I'm intrigued to know,

so if Holst was standing in his back
garden at night,

what could he see in the sky?

With the naked eye, he would've been
able to see Venus, of course.

I mean, Venus is often, depending
on where it is in its orbit,

but often the brightest
thing in the sky,

either close to sunset
or close to sunrise.

It's always close to the sun.

So he would have seen Venus
very bright, Jupiter, Saturn,

Mars, again extremely bright.

But that's pretty much it. Mmm.

CROWD APPLAUDS

Venus, The Bringer Of Peace.

It's a planet that's very
Earth-like in many ways.

It's not too much closer to the sun.
It's about the same size as Earth.

And this really led astronomers
in Holst's time

to consider it potentially Earth's
twin.

Just like Mars, it was considered to
be a world which may harbour life.

We can never see the ground from
Earth, it's shrouded in clouds.

And that added, I think, to this
idea

that Venus may be a tropical
paradise.

But as with Mars, you know,
we had a shock

when we first started to point,

initially, radio telescopes to
Venus,

and then began to fly space
probes past the planet.

We found that Venus is
a scorched world.

This is a photograph from a Russian
spacecraft called Venera 9,

which landed in 1975.

It found a world that it could
barely survive.

It only lasted for around an hour.

It measured temperatures of 465
degrees Celsius on the surface.

The atmospheric pressure is 90 times
the atmospheric pressure on Earth.

That means if you or I stood on
Venus,

we would be toasted
and then squashed.

And if that didn't do it for us,
we would be dissolved,

because the clouds of Venus
rain down sulphuric acid.

So, far from being an idyllic,
beautiful bringer of peace,

the goddess of love,

Venus is the closest world to hell
you could imagine.

AUDIENCE LAUGHS

Then we started peering through
the clouds using radar,

and we see a surface that is
covered in volcanoes,

far more volcanoes than any other
planet in the solar system.

What's interesting, though,
is that it seems that, again,

like Mars, Venus would have had
water on the surface,

may have been a habitable world,
may even have given rise to life,

may have been that paradise.

But something went wrong on Venus.

Those volcanoes pumped carbon
dioxide, sulphur dioxide,

greenhouse gasses
into the atmosphere.

The cycles of the planet ran
away with themselves.

A runaway greenhouse effect
heated the planet up

and destroyed it, certainly as a
habitable world.

So I think the lesson of Venus is
that planets are not eternal.

A world that was once heaven
can become hell.

Venus, Bringer Of Peace, becomes
a requiem for a failed planet,

and perhaps also a reflection on
how rare places like Earth might be.

MUSIC: Venus, Bringer Of Peace
by Gustav Holst

It is a vision of hell.

And I think that's fascinating
when you set it against the music.

I think that this idea that there
are just small falling motifs

and there's a couple of solos
in the orchestra as well,

so, really as a listener,

you're drawn into extremely personal
and lonely sounds.

And then the piece ends with just
the second violins playing.

A very long diminuendo,
suspended high note,

and you are left with this
sense of loss.

I'm sure Holst did not intend Venus
to be listened to that way.

How do you feel about that
re-interpretation?

Erm, so I find this layering
fascinating because, you know,

human beings aren't just 1-D things
that write seven notes on the page

and it forever means
that it's locked in history.

It's almost as if he had a weird
premonition

of what was to come, in terms of
some of the research as well,

because how can it be that this
music is so easily transformed?

And it sort of adds to the
more mystical

and mysterious side to his character
and what he wrote.

Mercury, The Winged Messenger.

There are spacecraft whose
job it is to observe the sun,

and one of them is called
the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

It just sort of sits there and looks
for solar flares and solar storms,

watching how the sun behaves.

But occasionally, the spacecraft
capture something quite magical.

They capture what's called
a transit of Mercury,

a small black dot, tracing its way
across the face of the star.

Now, Mercury zips around
the sun very fast.

"The Winged Messenger"
is a rather nice title

because it's very close to the sun,
but very difficult to get to.

The Mercury Messenger spacecraft, it
took seven years to get to Mercury.

It had to fly around the Earth once,
then go round Venus twice

and then round Mercury three times

before it had slowed down enough
to get into orbit.

What it found was a world that...
Well, we knew it would be hot.

It's close to the sun. It's about
430 degrees Celsius

by day on the surface.

However, because there's no
atmosphere on Mercury,

it drops to about minus 180 degrees
Celsius at night,

so it's a world of extremes.

Messenger found traces of what
astronomers called

"volatiles" on the surface,

things like potassium.

Now, that's interesting,

because potassium is only expected
to be found on planets

that form further out in the solar
system.

They're called volatiles for a
reason.

They boil away when they're close to
the sun.

So we now think that Mercury formed
much further away from the sun

than the position where it orbits
today.

So again, the Winged Messenger
seems to be rather apt.

Mercury has shifted a great deal in
its orbit

during the history
of the solar system and, in fact,

our simulations suggest that
it's at least possible

that Mercury will shift again and
fly out into the outer solar system,

perhaps even be lost into
interstellar space.

So Mercury illustrates another
important point.

The solar system is not a piece of
eternal clockwork

crafted by the gods, but a dynamic
living and evolving place.

MUSIC: Mercury, The Winged Messenger
by Gustav Holst

Jupiter is a dominant planet
in the solar system, in a sense.

It's two and a half times
the mass of all the other planets

and moons combined.

And that means that it's really
the only object

in the solar system, other than the
sun,

that has a quite profound
gravitational influence

on the rest of the system.

For example, the asteroid that wiped
out the dinosaurs

here on Earth 66 million years ago
is likely,

or at least it's possible, that it
was deflected

on to a collision course with Earth
by Jupiter.

Jupiter is a creator
and destroyer of worlds.

Now, we have a spacecraft in orbit
around Jupiter now called Juno,

which is sending back the most
remarkable images of the planet.

It's a spacecraft that,
for the first time,

orbits the north
and south pole of Jupiter.

When you zoom in, you see images of
clouds

that look almost like
Impressionist paintings.

The storm that we're probably most
aware of on Jupiter

is the Great Red Spot.

But it is shrinking, so
when Galileo saw the storm system,

you could have lined up three
Earths in that spot.

Gives you a sense of scale of
Jupiter. Now it's shrunk,

you could only fit about two Earths
across the diameter.

But it's still a big and long-lived
storm.

Jupiter is a fascinating
world in itself,

but equally fascinating is its own
mini solar system,

its moons, over 70 moons.

And the four brightest
were discovered by Galileo.

These moons played an extremely
important role

in the history of
human thought,

because they confirmed to Galileo

that we
are not the centre of the universe.

Because when you look at Jupiter
through a telescope,

it's obvious that those moons are in
orbit around it and not around us.

Those moons are worlds
with their own characters.

Io is the most volcanically active
body in the solar system.

And then, a rather magical world
called Europa,

a moon covered in a shell
of frozen water ice.

But we know that beneath that shell
of water ice,

there is an ocean of liquid
salt-water.

It contains more water than all
the oceans of the Earth combined.

And so Europa may well be a home
for life.

Now, we've got our first
pictures of the planet,

and particularly the moons, from two
iconic spacecraft,

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

These spacecraft were
launched in 1977.

They arrived at Jupiter in 1979.

We are still in touch with them
both today,

41 years after they were launched.

Voyager 1 is 13.3 billion miles away
from Earth in interstellar space.

It's a tiny little thing.

I want to show you this photograph
of me

standing in front of a scale
model of it at JPL in California.

It's a remarkable engineering
achievement.

On Valentine's Day, 1990, as it was
on its way out of the solar system,

it took what I think is
the most famous image,

certainly of Earth, in the history
of space exploration,

when it was 4 billion miles from
home.

It's called the Pale Blue Dot image.

Now, there are coloured stripes
crossing the image,

which are lens flare.

But if you look carefully
in the red stripe,

you'll see a point of light,
which is our planet, the Earth,

the Pale Blue Dot.

Carl Sagan, who's one of my great
heroes,

wrote a very powerful piece of prose
about this image,

reflecting on what it tells us
about our place in the universe.

"The Earth," he wrote,

"..is a very small stage in a vast
cosmic arena.

"Think of the rivers of blood
spilled by all those generals

"and emperors so that in glory
and in triumph,

"they could become the momentary
masters of a fraction of a dot.

"Think of the endless cruelties
visited

"by the inhabitants of one corner of
this dot

"on the scarcely distinguishable
inhabitants

"of some other corner of the dot.

"How frequent their
misunderstandings,

"how eager they are to kill
one another.

"How fervent their hatreds.

"Our posturings,
our imagined self-importance,

"the delusion that we have some
privileged position in the universe

"are challenged by this
point of pale light."

This idea that Jupiter might
represent humility,

they're the beginnings of the
realisation

that we are perhaps more fragile,
smaller, and more interdependent,

both with each other and the wider
universe,

than we often like to imagine.

I find fascinating, in the context
of tonight's performance,

that Holst's Jupiter, after all,

contains one of the most well-known
passages in classical music,

the lyrical section that became
the patriotic hymn

I Vow To Thee, My Country.

Patriotism. The love of country.
These are important ideas.

They were important to Holst.

But so, too, is the idea that we
are one civilisation

living together precariously on one
planet

in an ever-changing and
always-challenging universe.

If we are to avoid Sagan's endless
cruelties of history,

we must find a way to reconcile
our affection for our countries

with our responsibility
to protect our home world

by working together.

It's my view that the exploration
of space

has helped deliver this perspective.

CROWD APPLAUDS

MUSIC: Jupiter, The Bringer Of
Jollity by Gustav Holst

CROWD APPLAUDS

And what I think is really
interesting is,

in terms of all the planets and all
of the movements,

this is the one planet that has
the most important

and emotional journey where you have
the physical decay of death

at the beginning, and then of serene
acceptance.

That's a good point.

I mean, I could show so many
pictures from the Cassini spacecraft

which was in orbit around Saturn for
a long time.

The interesting thing about this
ring system

that we learnt recently is that it's
extremely young,

probably only tens of millions
of years old,

a dynamic world that's changed
radically over...

in a fraction, the blink
of an eye in geological time.

And I think how this fits in is
maybe the serene acceptance

could be a sense or renewal
and rebirth

and things growing and
things not dying.

Saturn, The Bringer Of Old Age.

Saturn is, I suppose,
the most iconic planet,

made famous by its ring system.

They are an intricate system,
beautifully complex,

made of a very simple thing -
ice,

water ice sprinkled around the
planet. Snowflakes, if you like.

A friend of mine who worked on the
Cassini probe,

which has taken the most spectacular
images of Saturn,

said that it's like, you know when
you get a magnet

and sprinkle iron filings over it,
and you can see the magnetic field?

Well, in the same way,
it's like some deity

has sprinkled snowflakes over Saturn

so you can see the gravitational
field.

Its rings, they look impossibly
thin and they are impossibly thin.

They're, in fact,
only around ten metres thick,

so they would fit comfortably inside
this auditorium.

And they also, we've
found, are most likely young.

What we think happened was that
a moon came close to the planets,

probably in collision with
another moon,

or perhaps a gravitational
interaction with another moon,

and then dissociated and broke up to
form the rings.

It's possible that they
weren't there

when the dinosaurs were on Earth.

So if the dinosaurs had invented
telescopes

and looked up at Saturn,

they may well not have seen that
planet that we see today.

Saturn has one of the largest
moons in the solar system, Titan,

which, in this image,
you see above the ring plane.

Titan is the only
object in the solar system,

other than Earth,
that has liquid on its surface.

But it's freezing cold,

a long way from the sun, minus 180
degrees Celsius or so.

So that liquid is not water.
It's liquid methane.

Liquefied natural gas.

So this moon has lakes and seas
and rivers of methane.

It has methane rain
and methane snow.

A methanological cycle,

in the same way that Earth has
a hydrological cycle.

We also think that it may have
liquid water below the surface,

so, again, this is an interesting
moon in the context of life.

But there is another moon around
Saturn that is equally,

even perhaps more intriguing.

It's a moon called Enceladus.

What we see on Enceladus
are fountains of ice

rising up from the surface
and disappearing off into space.

Beautiful, but what we think is
causing those fountains

is even more beautiful.

We are now, I would say, certain

that there are lakes of liquid water
below the surface of Enceladus.

And on the floors of those lakes, we
think there are geological systems.

Systems called hydrothermal vents.

Now, that is fascinating

because we think that one of the
prime candidates

for the origin of life on Earth 3.8
billion years ago

are hydrothermal vent systems,

where you get energy in contact with
rock, in contact with minerals,

and that transition from
geo-chemistry

to biochemistry happened.

So this moon is one of the prime
candidates

to look for life beyond Earth
in the solar system.

And when we look at images
of Saturn,

which are backlit by the sun,

you see the sunlight illuminating
the rings.

There's a diffuse ring far away
from Saturn known as the E Ring,

which is created by the ice
fountains of Enceladus.

So it's a tiny moon, but with
a potentially dramatic impact,

in terms of the creation of the
rings, but also philosophically,

intellectually, as a possible home
for life.

So, Saturn, The Bringer Of Old Age,
in Holst's mind,

is not a world enjoying
a sedate old age.

It's a dynamic world,

a fast-changing system,
constantly rejuvenating,

raging against the dying
of the light.

And its moons, in particular tiny
Enceladus,

are perhaps engaged in the most
spectacular rejuvenation of all.

That natural transformation of rock
and minerals and water

and heat into living matter.

They're the transition
from geo-chemistry to biochemistry

that brings meaning to the universe.

MUSIC: Saturn, the Bringer of Old
Age by Gustav Holst

CROWD APPLAUD

We are now entering the mysterious
dark frontier of the solar system.

Uranus, the Magician.

These worlds would have been
absolutely unfamiliar to Holst.

No more than points of light,
because they are so far away.

When we look at Uranus

through our most powerful telescopes
on Earth,

and here you see it through The VLT,
the Very Large Telescope...

It's powerful.

..we see that it's a planet you can
see some surface features.

It's a blue planet with white,
high altitude clouds.

And also, four moons are visible in
this VLT image.

The image looks odd, though, because
the moons are aligned vertically.

The planet appears to be tipped
up on its side.

And that's because it is.

That's one of the most mysterious
things about Uranus,

it orbits the sun with its poles
leading the way.

Now, why?

It's almost certain that Uranus must
have been hit by a large planet

at some point in the very distant
past,

four and a half billion years
ago

during the formation of the solar
system, which tipped it over.

Also from Earth-based telescopes,

we can see that Uranus has
a ring system.

It's nowhere near as spectacular
as Saturn's rings,

but they're rings, nonetheless.

Sunlight out there is only
1/400th

of the intensity of sunlight
here on Earth.

Temperatures are very low, the cloud
tops are minus 224 degrees Celsius.

But there are very powerful
winds there.

The winds at the equator
move at 200mph,

but in the opposite direction to
its spin. Very strange.

But as you move up to the tropics,
towards the poles,

the winds reverse direction
and blow in excess of 500mph.

The moons are beautifully named,
actually.

They're named after
Shakespearian spirits

and spirits in English literature.

So Umbriel, Ariel, Miranda.

Now, the only spacecraft to make it
this far out was Voyager 2.

The photographs,

because light is so dim and Voyager
was travelling so fast,

are quite blurry sometimes.

This is a photograph of Umbriel.
You don't see much detail.

And Miranda...

..which is one of my favourite
moons,

because it really does look like
some kind of drunken deity

assembled it on their day off.

It's a complete mess. Bits of rigid
sort of... Bits of rock stuck on.

Big canyons.

And the reason, of course, is it
must have been split apart

by a collision many billions of
years ago, and then reformed.

So, the Uranus system is
a strange system.

It's a long way away from the Earth.

Voyager only spent five and a half
hours in the system

as it travelled through,
taking these,

the only photographs we have from
near the planet,

and then left,

leaving the strange tilted magician
behind in the twilight.

MUSIC: Uranus, the Magician
by Gustav Holst

CROWD APPLAUDS

Neptune does sound like the
soundtrack

to a 1960s science fiction movie in
a way, doesn't it?

Sounds very Star Trek-y,
actually, at the end.

Yeah, I think
he's such a mini John Williams

because you hear the celeste,
you hear the harps,

you hear the harmony that's not
quite conventional,

you hear the low brooding sounds.

And he does create this
world

that we have associated with
blockbuster movies.

I mean, if you were to
look in the score,

just at the end,
at the ladies' chorus...

..this is a facsimile
of the original score.

This bar is to be repeated until the
sound is lost in the distance.

FEMALE CHORAL SINGING

You have this wonderful ethereal
quality to the voices

where you can't quite hear what
exactly is going on

or what they're saying,

but it creates this space for you as
a listener where you think,

"Actually, what is out there?"

And then you end up with this
thing which is...

..you know, the fading away.

"Lost in the distance",
he writes. Which is...

And they're sort of harmonically
resolving.

There's tension, there's release,
there's tension, there's release.

So it's almost like the heartbeat
of the music

is just still slowly carrying on

as it sort of disappears into the
universe. Yeah.

CROWD APPLAUDS

In summer 1989, Voyager 2 arrived at
Neptune,

the true frozen outpost of the solar
system,

a planet that's known as an ice
giant.

It dwarves the Earth, but made, just
like Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus,

primarily out of gas.

It's still very cold, minus 220
degrees or so at the cloudtops.

But Neptune produces some heat
internally,

and so at some point as you
dive below the clouds

and the pressure's increased,
there is, we expect,

a zone where you could find,
perhaps, liquid water.

Neptune is a world of violent winds.

We saw high altitude
clouds as Voyager passed by,

clouds of methane crystals,

supersonic winds that
blow at speeds of up to 1,200mph.

It has moons and the largest moon is
a moon called Triton.

And this is so far away from the
sun,

very little energy falls on its
surface.

But we saw activity. We saw geysers
erupting into the air.

Geysers of nitrogen, sprinkling dark
material

down wind on to its surface,

processes that we don't yet
fully understand,

leaving streaks across the surface
of the moon.

But as Voyager left
the Neptunian system,

it took one of the most iconic
images

in the history of space
exploration.

I think, actually,
it's my personal favourite,

and I think it enhances Holst's
music more than words.

Crescent Neptune, and a moon Triton.

A world of ice 230 degrees
below zero,

orbiting a blue planet of storms.

These two worlds remained unseen

for four and a half billion years
after their formation,

until our tiny emissary from Earth

passed by on its way to
interstellar space.

Now, I suggested at the beginning
of tonight's performance

that I hoped new ideas would emerge
from the synthesis

between Holst's music and the images
and scientific discoveries

we've made since the first
performance of The Planets,

precisely 100 years ago today,
on 29th September, 1918.

And, for me, they have.

There are billions of planets
beyond our solar system,

orbiting around the 200 billion
stars in the Milky Way galaxy,

and in the billions
of galaxies beyond.

But we discovered that solar
systems and their planets

are not necessarily, or even
perhaps, usually stable...

..on the time scales necessary to
allow complex life

and civilisations to evolve.

So we, the human race, might be
extremely fortunate to exist

and, therefore, we may be
indescribably rare,

and therefore precious.

I mean, imagine that there are no
other civilisations in our galaxy.

There would then be no music
amongst the stars.

Holst tells us through his music
that it's up to us

how we navigate our problems,

to choose HOW, or even IF we want
to undertake the journey

from Mars to Neptune,
from war to enlightenment.

His message is amplified,
I think, a hundredfold,

by an understanding of our place in
the universe,

an understanding of the fragility
and value of humanity,

living as we do together on a small
world,

accompanied by our seven planetary
companions adrift in the dark.

MUSIC: Neptune, the Mystic
by Gustav Holst

CROWD APPLAUD