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Gustav Holst

Gustav Holst
Born September 21, 1874 in Cheltenham, England
Died May 25, 1934 in London, England
  • Period: Modern (1870-)
  • Country: England
  • Genres: Concerto, Band, Choral, Orchestral, Opera, Ballet

Biography

Known primarily for his popular orchestral composition, The Planets, Gustav Holst embraced a wide variety of musical models, from Arthur Sullivan, Edvard Grieg, and Wagner to the melodic simplicity of English folk music. In his maturity, he managed to merge these various influences into a rather sparse personal style that became increasingly transparent in his later years. Perhaps his greatest talent lay in the realm of choral music; his Hymn of Jesus stands as one of the finest works in the genre from the early twentieth century.

Holst's first instruction came from his father, Adolph, a piano teacher, who also made him take lessons on the violin and trombone; the father believed that these studies might alleviate the youth's asthma.

By age 12, the young Holst was composing, even dabbling in orchestration; in 1888, he won a prize in an amateur competition for his vocal work, A Christmas Carol. Thereafter he sang in the All Saints' Church choir and played violin and trombone in its orchestra. In 1892, he traveled to London and heard a Covent Garden performance of Götterdämmerung, led by Mahler. The experience opened up new compositional vistas for the young composer.

Holst entered the Royal College of Music the following year where he met fellow student Ralph Vaughan Williams, who would remain a close lifelong friend. Shortly after his arrival in London, Holst found that the neuritis in his right arm, which had afflicted him in his early youth, had worsened and now caused him to abandon ideas of a career as a concert pianist. In 1898, Holst left the RCM to take a position in the Carl Rosa Opera Company as rehearsal pianist and coach. He completed his Cotswold Symphony in 1900, and its premiere in April 1902 was a success. On June 22, 1901, Holst married Emily Isobel Harrison, whom he had met in a choir he had directed a few years before.

In late 1903, Holst took on a teaching position at James Allen's Girls' School, in South London. The following year he acquired a second post, the directorship of music at St. Paul's Girls' School, which he would retain until his death. He added another teaching post at Morley College in 1907, bogging him down and leaving little time for composition. Still, the St. Paul's Suite, written during this period (1912-1913), is among his most often-performed works.

In 1914, Holst began work on what would become his most popular composition, The Planets. The war years were extremely productive, as the composer not only completed The Planets, but also wrote Hymn of Jesus. In spring 1918, Holst began educational work for the YMCA at its various facilities on European battlefields.

He returned to London at the end of June 1919 and took a prestigious post teaching theory and composition at the RCM in 1920. The composer's fame was not only growing domestically in the early 1920s but internationally as well, as works like the Hymn of Jesus were receiving regular and acclaimed performances. By 1924, Holst's health was clearly declining, and he thus lessened his workload.

Beginning in late December 1928, Holst made a series of trips abroad that included visits to France, Italy, Sicily, and the U.S. In Boston, a duodenal ulcer was diagnosed in 1932. On May 23, 1934, he underwent surgery for the ulcer, but died two days later. ~ Robert Cummings, All Music Guide

Discography

Gustav Holst Conducts The Planets

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Actor:

Gustav Holst

  • Born: 1874 09 21
  • Died: 1934 05 23

Biography

With one exception, the sole composition quoted in film and television productions from this popular, eccentric, and major British composer has been his spectacular impressionistic suite The Planets, Op. 32 (1914-1916) for large orchestra and choir. Various movements from this work have been used in The Bells (1931), Birth of a Robot (1936), Existió otra humanidad (1977), Fei taugh mo neuih (1977) (aka The Witch With Flying Head,) Shi di chu ma (1980) (aka The Young Master), The Right Stuff (1983), Voyage to the Outer Planets and Beyond (1986), the film about neo-Nazis Blood in the Face (1991), and an uncredited use in Trinity and Beyond (1995) (aka The Atomic Bomb Movie).

Director and writer Barbara Willis Sweete's The Planets, made for television in 1994, re-arranges the sequence of the movements in Holst's original suite to create a rich narrative that combines dance, ice skating, and underwater ballet. The film opens with Neptune, the Mystic (originally the seventh and last movement) underscoring a creation ritual that gives birth to a proto-couple in an underwater ballet. Uranus, the Magician (originally movement six) continues the conjuring on the skating surface. Venus, the Bringer of Peace (originally movement two) begins as a dance solo for Venus, clad in cream and light brown colors, who calls forth a line of skaters in icy blue clothes who move as if sailing across clouds under a starry sky. The couple then skate to the sensual, yet somewhat plaintive music. Mercury, the Winged Messenger (originally movement three) springs forth, skating to lilting music in fast triplets. His arms playfully sway, he imitates marching, and spins. The attendant gods and goddesses are amused by his antics. Mars, the Bringer of War (originally the first movement), danced to an insistent 5/4 rhythm, opens with gymnastic movements and floor patterns which call forth a string of faceless, helmeted skaters giving Fascist salutes. The couple lose themselves in the expression of an intrapersonal struggle. Another mass of skaters slice through each other's pathways in a complex matrix of intersections. As the music concludes, the marchers invade and destroy part of the Olympian temple. Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age is retitled Saturn, the Bringer of Life (originally movement five) in Barbara Sweete's script as this god re-animates the victims of the rampage with motions that seem to stir the breath of earthly winds. To beautiful whole-tone chords and tubular bells, the dead awake. After a solo of fantastic turns, leaps, and even a somersault, the last section, Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity (originally movement four), provides a glorious, celebratory finale for all the dancers, skaters, and water figures.

Ken Russell's made-for-television version of The Planets (1983) associates the kinetic movements of Holst's score through powerful and evocative imagery of macroscopic and microscopic events in the universe, the systems of planets, daily life, historical events and conflicts, the growing of flowers, the Brownian motion of tiny bodies, and blood flow. Russell's sensitivity to the subtleties of the music enables this cornucopia to go beyond mere collage and to create enriching new associative interplay and meaning. The "sole exception" referred to earlier was the Julie Andrews: The Sound of Christmas (1987) television special which featured a moving performance of the composer's soulful carol "In the Bleak Midwinter". Many of Holst's other mystical/religious works have yet to be explored in film, such as his The Hymn of Jesus, Op. 37. ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Movie Guide

 
Music Encyclopedia: Gustav(us Theodore von) Holst

(b Cheltenham, 21 Sept 1874; d London, 25 May 1934). English composer. He studied at the RCM with Stanford, and in 1895 met Vaughan Williams, to whom he was close for the rest of his life. From 1905 he taught at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith.

Like Vaughan Williams, he was impressed by English folksong, but also important was his reading in Sanskrit literature (chamber opera Sāvitri, composed1908; Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, 1912) and his experience of the orchestral music of Stravinsky and Strauss (he had played the trombone professionally). In The Planets (1916) he produced a suite of seven highly characterful movements to represent human dispositions associated with the planets in astrology, and his interest in esoteric wisdom is expressed too in his cantata The Hymn of Jesus (1917). But his very varied output also includes essays in a fluent neo-classicism (A Fugal Concerto for flute, oboe and strings,1923; Double Violin Concerto, 1929), a bare Hardy impression (Egdon Heath, 1927) and operas.

works:
Operas
  • Sāvitri (1916)
  • The Perfect Fool (1923)
  • At the Boar's Head (1925)
  • The Wandering Scholar (1934)
Choral-orchestral music
  • Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda (1912)
  • The Hymn of Jesus (1917)
  • Ode to Death (1919)
  • First Choral Symphony (1924)
  • A Choral Fantasia (1930)
Other choral music
  • The Evening-Watch (1924)
  • 8 Canons (1932)
  • partsongs
  • folksong arrs.
Orchestral music
  • St Paul's Suite (1913)
  • The Planets (1916)
  • Egdon Heath (1927)
  • Brook Green Suite (1933)
  • Hammersmith (1930)
  • Lyric Movement, va, chamber orch (1933)
Songs
  • 4 Songs (anon., 15th century), S/T, vn (1917)
  • 12 Songs (H. Wolfe) (1929)


 
Biography: Gustav Holst

Gustav Holst (1874-1934) was one of the most important English composers of his time, even though little of his music continued to be played.

Gustav Holst's paternal great-grandfather was born in Sweden, but all his other forebears were English. For four generations they were professional musicians, his father being organist and choirmaster in Cheltenham. Gustav wrote compositions as soon as he was able to hold a pen and played various instruments as fast as they came his way. When he was 12, he was already studying Hector Berlioz's orchestration treatise.

Holst received his formal training at the Royal College of Music in London. When neuritis prevented his becoming a pianist, he took up the trombone, and for many years he supported himself by playing in opera and symphony orchestras, an excellent opportunity to become acquainted with a wide variety of music and to learn orchestration through practical experience. Beginning in 1903 he became a teacher at several London schools and, eventually, at the Royal College of Music. He knew Sanskrit and Hindu literature and composed several choral works and an opera based on Hindu epics.

During World War I Holst was sent to Salonika, Greece, and to Constantinople to organize musical activities among the British soldiers stationed there. In 1923 he conducted and lectured at the University of Michigan, and he lectured at Harvard in 1932.

Holst composed about 50 works. Because of the importance of choral singing in England, many of his compositions are for choir. The best known of these are The Hymn of Jesus (1917) and the Ode to Death (1922). He also wrote many songs and several operas, including The Perfect Fool (1923) and At the Boar's Head (1925).

Holst's most important piece, and the one that is most often played, is the orchestral suite The Planets (1914-1917). It is a large-scale, brilliantly orchestrated series of tone poems devoted to seven of the planets: Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. He uses polytonality and polyrhythms and treats the orchestra with great skill and freedom.

English composers of Holst's generation were at a disadvantage in that they wrote at a time when Igor Stravinsky began to dominate the international musical scene. In the late 1920s, when Stravinsky turned to neoclassic ideals, composers who wrote symphonic poems and folk-based choral pieces were considered old-fashioned. Holst was an honest, if unfashionable, composer, and he did not follow the musical fashions of his day. He was always true to his background and convictions, and his music impresses by its sincerity and highly professional workmanship.

Further Reading

The best studies of Holst were written by his daughter, Imogen, who followed the family tradition of being a composer and critic. They are Gustav Holst (1938) and The Music of Gustav Holst (1951). Another study, by an English composer, is Edmund Rubbra, Gustav Holst (1947).

Additional Sources

Holst, Imogen, Gustav Holst: a biography, Oxford Oxfordshire; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Holst, Imogen, Holst, London; Boston: Faber & Faber, 1981.

Short, Michael, Gustav Holst: the man and his music, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Gustavus Theodore von Holst

(born Sept. 21, 1874, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, Eng. — died May 25, 1934, London) British composer. The son of an organist, he studied at the Royal College of Music. There he met Ralph Vaughan Williams, who became a friend for life. He made his living first by playing trombone, then as a teacher. Always frail, after a collapse in 1923 he gave up teaching to devote the rest of his life to composition. His most popular piece is the vividly orchestrated suite The Planets (1916); other works include the charming St. Paul's Suite for strings (1913), the Hymn of Jesus (1917), and the Choral Fantasia (1930).

For more information on Gustavus Theodore von Holst, visit Britannica.com.

 
British History: Gustav Holst

Holst, Gustav (1874-1934). Of German/Swedish ancestry, he was one of the most original English composers of his day and an influential teacher. Holst studied composition with Stanford at London's Royal College of Music alongside his lifelong friend Vaughan Williams, with whom he shared a passionate interest in folk-song. The sparse economy of his later works, together with their adventurous harmonies and use of bi-tonality, was regarded by many contemporaries as excessively cerebral. The Planets (1914-16, first performed 1919), however, was an immediate and lasting success.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Holst, Gustav
(hŏlst) , 1874–1934, English composer, studied at the Royal College of Music. Grieg, Richard Strauss, and Ralph Vaughan Williams influenced his early work, but most of his music is highly original. Outstanding compositions are The Planets (1918), a suite for orchestra; The Hymn of Jesus (1920), for chorus and orchestra; The Perfect Fool (1923), an opera; and Egdon Heath (1928), an orchestral piece.

Bibliography

See biography (1938) and study (2d ed. 1968) by his daughter, Imogen Holst.

 
Wikipedia: Gustav Holst
Gustav Holst
Enlarge
Gustav Holst

Gustav Holst (21 September, 1874 - 25 May, 1934) [1] [2] was an English composer and was a music teacher for over 20 years. Holst is most famous for his orchestral suite The Planets.[1] Having studied at the Royal College of Music in London,[2] his early work was influenced by Ravel,[2] Grieg, Richard Strauss, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, [3] but most of his music is highly original, with influences from Hindu spiritualism and English folk tunes.[2] Holst's music is well known for unconventional use of metre and haunting melodies.

Gustav Holst wrote almost 200 catalogued compositions, including orchestral suites, operas, ballets, concertos, choral hymns, and songs. (See Selected works, below).

Holst became music master at St Paul's Girls' School [4] in 1905 and also director of music at Morley College in 1907, continuing in both posts until retirement (as detailed below).[2]

He was the brother of Hollywood actor Ernest Cossart, and father of the composer and conductor Imogen Holst, who wrote a biography of her father in 1938.[3]

Life

Name

He was originally named Gustavus Theodor von Holst but he dropped the von from his name in response to anti-German sentiment in Britain during World War I, making it official by deed poll in 1918.[5]

Early life

Holst was born in 1874 at 4 Clarence Road, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England[1] [5][6] to a family of Swedish extraction (by way of Latvia and Russia). The house was opened as a museum of Holst's life and times in 1974. He was educated at Cheltenham Grammar School for Boys.

Holst's grandfather, Gustavus von Holst of Riga, Latvia, a composer of elegant harp music, moved to England, becoming a notable harp teacher.[5] Holst's father Adolph Holst, an organist, pianist, and choirmaster, taught piano lessons and gave recitals; and his mother, Clara von Holst, who died when Gustav was eight, was a singer.[5] As a frail child whose early recollections were musical, Holst had been taught to play piano and violin, and began composing when he was about twelve.[5]

Holst's father was the organist[1] 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.

Holst grew up in the world of Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle, Gauguin, Monet, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Puccini. 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,[2] which was less painful to play.

 Royal College of Music (1894 site), where Gustav Holst & Ralph Vaughan Williams studied in 1895
Enlarge
Royal College of Music (1894 site), where Gustav Holst & Ralph Vaughan Williams studied in 1895

He attended the newly relocated Royal College of Music[1] in London on a scholarship, studying with Charles V. Stanford, and there in 1895,[5] he met fellow student and lifelong friend Ralph Vaughan Williams,[1] whose own music was, for the most part, quite different from Holst’s,[5] but whose praise for his work was abundant and who later shared an interest in Holst teaching the English vocal and choral tradition (folk song, madrigals, and church music).[2]

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 by William Morris, both of whom were among the UK's most outspoken supporters of the socialist movement in the UK.

It was also during these years that Holst became interested in Hindu mysticism and spirituality,[2] and this interest was to influence his later works, including Sita (18991906, a three-act opera based on an episode in the Ramayana), Sāvitri,[2] a chamber opera based on a tale from the Mahabharata, and Hymns from the Rig Veda,[2] in preparation for which he taught himself basic Sanskrit to avoid reliance 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[1] in the Carl Rosa Opera Company[2] and 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.[1]

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[5] and Robert Bridges.

Musical career

In 1905, Holst was appointed Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School[4][2] in Hammersmith, London, where he composed the successful and still popular St Paul's Suite[4] for the school orchestra in 1913.[1] In 1907, Holst also became director of music at Morley College.[2] Those two leadership positions were the most important of his teaching posts, and he retained both posts until the end of his life.[2]

During the first two decades of the 20th century, musical society as a whole, and Holst's friend Vaughan Williams in particular, became interested in old English folksongs, madrigal singers,[2] 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[citation needed]. He also travelled outside the bounds of Europe, heading to French-controlled Algeria in 1906 on doctor's 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 composition. 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 travelling, 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."

Shortly after his return, St Paul’s Girls School[4] opened a new music wing, and Holst composed St Paul’s Suite[4] for the occasion.[1] At around this time (1913), Stravinsky premiered the Rite of Spring, sparking riots in Paris and caustic criticism in London. A year later, Holst first heard Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, an ‘ultra-modern’ set of five movements employing ‘extreme chromaticism’ (the consistent use of all 12 musical notes). Holst would have certainly been affected by the performance and, although he had earlier lampooned the stranger aspects of modern music (he had a strong sense of humour), the new music of Stravinsky[2] and Schoenberg influenced, if not initially spurred, his work on The Planets.

Holst's compositions for 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.

The Planets

Main article: The Planets

Holst and wife Isobel bought a cottage in Thaxted, Essex and, surrounded by medieval buildings and ample rambling opportunities, he started work on the suite that would become his best known work, the orchestral suite The Planets. It was meant to be a series of ‘mood pictures’ rather than anything concretely connected with astrology or astronomy, though Holst was known to have been using the book What Is A Horoscope by Alan Leo as a guide:

  • Mars – Independent, Ambitious, Headstrong
  • Venus – Awakens Affection and Emotion
  • Mercury – The ‘Winged Messenger of the Gods’, Resourceful, Adaptable
  • Jupiter – Brings Abundance, Perseverance

Holst was also influenced by a 19th-century astrologer called Raphael, whose book concerning the planets' role in world affairs led Holst to develop the grand vision of the planets that made The Planets suite such an enduring success.

The work was finished in two stages, with Mars, Venus and Jupiter written at one time, and Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Mercury written after a break that Holst had taken to work on other pieces. The work was finished in 1916.[1] The influence of Stravinsky was picked up by a critic who called it ‘the English Le Sacre du Printemps (Rite of Spring)’.

The first of the seven pieces is Mars, ‘the most ferocious piece of music in existence’, evoking a battle scene of immense proportion with its signature 5/4 metre (it changes to 5/2 and 3/4 at the end) and blatant dissonance. Holst directed that it be played slightly faster than a regular march, giving it a mechanized and inhuman character. It is often a surprise to learn that Mars was actually finished just before the horrors of World War I. Mars is easily Holst’s most famous piece, and has been quoted in everything from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos to The Venture Brothers episode, Hate Floats.

Calm Venus and self-satisfied Jupiter, both also quite well known, demonstrate influence from Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, Elgar and Schoenberg.

Uranus at first appears to be a quirky and frenetic homage to Dukas’s The Sorcerer's Apprentice, but Holst did not know the Frenchman's score at the time. Neptune is mysterious and evokes an other-worldly scene.

Most original is Saturn, in which 'a threatening clock ticks inexorably as the bassline, revealing both the dignity and frailties of old age'. Saturn was reputedly Holst's favourite of the seven movements.

Holst lived to see the discovery of Pluto in 1930. Although it was immediately accepted as a planet, Holst chose not to add Pluto to his suite. He seems to have been vindicated by the 2006 decision by the International Astronomical Union to downgrade Pluto's planetary status to that of dwarf planet. A piece entitled "Pluto: The Renewer" was composed by Colin Matthews in 2000, and it has been occasionally included in performances of The Planets.

Holst himself conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the very first electrical recording of The Planets, in 1926, for HMV. Although, as his daughter Imogen noted, he couldn't quite achieve the gradual fade-out of women's voices and orchestra he had written (owing to the limitations of early electrical recording), it was a landmark recording of the work. The performance was later issued on LP and CD format.

At the onset of World War I, Holst tried to enlist but was rejected because of his bad eyes, bad lungs, and bad digestion. In wartime England, Holst was persuaded to drop the ‘von’ from his name, as it aroused suspicion. His new music, however, was readily received, as ‘patriotic’ and English music was demanded at concert halls, partly due to a ban on all ‘Teutonic’ music. Towards the end of the war he was offered a post within the YMCA’s educational work programme as Musical Director, and he set off for Salonica (present day Thessoliniki, Greece) and Constantinople in 1918. While he was teaching music to troops eager to escape the drudgery of army life, The Planets Suite was being performed to audiences back home. Shortly after his return after the war’s end, Holst composed Ode to Death, based upon a poem by Walt Whitman.

During the years 1920 – 1923, Holst's popularity grew through the success of The Planets and The Hymn of Jesus (1917)[1] (based on the Apocryphal gospels), and the publication of a new opera, The Perfect Fool (a satire of a work by Wagner). Holst became something of 'an anomaly, a famous English composer’, and was busy with conducting, lecturing, and teaching obligations. He hated publicity – he often refused to answer questions posed by the press, and when asked for his autograph, handed out prepared cards that read, “I do not hand out my autograph”. Though he may not have liked the attention, he appreciated having enough money for the first time in his life. Always frail, after a collapse in 1923 he retired from teaching to devote the remaining (eleven) years of his life to composition.[1]

Later life

In the following years, he took advantage of new technology to publicize his work through sound recordings and the BBC’s ‘wireless’ broadcasts. In 1927, he was commissioned by the New York Symphony Orchestra to write a symphony. He took this opportunity to work on an orchestral piece based on Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a work that would become Egdon Heath, and which would be first performed a month after Hardy’s death, in his memory. By this time, Holst was ‘going out of fashion’, and the piece was poorly reviewed. However, Holst is said to have considered the short, subdued but powerful tone poem his greatest masterpiece. The piece has been much better received in recent years, with several recordings available.

Towards the end of his life, in 1930, Gustav Holst wrote Choral Fantasia (1930)[1], and he was commissioned by the BBC to write a piece for military band: the resulting Hammersmith was a tribute to the place where he had spent most of his life, a musical expression of the London borough (of Hammersmith), which begins with an attempt to recreate the haunting sound of the River Thames sleepily flowing its way.

Gustav Holst had a lifetime of poor health worsened by a concussion during a backward fall from the conductor's podium, from which he never fully recovered.[5] In his final 4 years, Holst grew ill with stomach problems. One of his last compositions, The Brook Green Suite, named after the land on which St Paul’s Girls’ School[4] was built, was performed for the first time a few months before his death. He died of complications following stomach surgery, in London, on May 25, 1934. His ashes were interred at Chichester Cathedral in West Sussex, with Bishop George Bell giving the memorial oration at the funeral.

Audio Biography

In 2007, BBC Radio 4 produced a radio play "The Bringer of Peace" by Martyn Wade, which is an intimate biographical portrait of composer Gustav Holst. The play follows his early dismay at his lack of composing success, to the creation of the Planets Suite; it is in seven tiers, following the structure of the Planets Suite. Adrian Scarborough played Gustav Holst. The producer was David Hitchinson. [1]

Media

  • Mars, the Bringer of War
    noicon
    Mars, from The Planets
    Venus, the Bringer of Peace
    noicon
    Venus, from The Planets
    Uranus, the Magician
    noicon
    Uranus, from The Planets
  • Problems playing the files? See media help.

Selected works

For a full list, see List of compositions by Gustav Holst.

The following are some of the compositions by Gustav Holst: [7]

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n
        Britannica Concise, "Gustav Holst", 2006, Concise.Britannica.com webpage:
        ConcBritannica-GHolst.
    
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Encyclopædia Britannica Online, "Gustav Holst", 2006, Britannica.com webpage: Britannica-GHolst.
  3. ^ a b HighBeam Encyclopedia, "Gustav Holst", 2006, Encyclopedia.com webpage: EncyclopediaCom-GHolst.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g The school does not use a dotted "St." in their title "St Paul's Girls' School" (see St Paul's website: SPGS.org).
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i
  6. ^ Holst Birthplace Museum website
  7. ^ "Gustav Holst (1874-1934) | Compositions" (online), Kenric Taylor, 2006, GustavHolst.info webpage: GHolstInfo-Compositions.

References

  • Kenric Taylor, "Gustav Holst (1874-1934) | Compositions" (list of works), 2006, GustavHolst.info webpage: GHolstInfo-Compositions.

External links


 
 

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Artist. Copyright © 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. Content provided by All Music Guide ® , a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Actor. Copyright © 2006 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Music Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
British History. A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Gustav Holst" Read more

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