86 Facts About Gustav Holst

Gustav Holst hoped to become a pianist, but was prevented by neuritis in his right arm.

Gustav Holst was the founder of a series of Whitsun music festivals, which ran from 1916 for the remainder of his life.

Gustav Holst's works were played frequently in the early years of the 20th century, but it was not until the international success of The Planets in the years immediately after the First World War that he became a well-known figure.

Gustav Holst was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the elder of the two children of Adolph von Gustav Holst, a professional musician, and his wife, Clara Cox, nee Lediard.

Gustav Holst's was of mostly British descent, daughter of a respected Cirencester solicitor; the Holst side of the family was of mixed Swedish, Latvian and German ancestry, with at least one professional musician in each of the previous three generations.

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One of Gustav Holst's great-grandfathers, Matthias Gustav Holst, born in Riga, Latvia, was of German origin; he served as composer and harp-teacher to the Imperial Russian Court in St Petersburg.

Gustav Holst appropriated the aristocratic prefix "von" and added it to the family name in the hope of gaining enhanced prestige and attracting pupils.

Gustav Holst's wife, Clara, a former pupil, was a talented singer and pianist.

Gustav Holst recognised her devotion to the family and dedicated several of his early compositions to her.

Mary von Gustav Holst was absorbed in theosophy and not greatly interested in domestic matters.

Gustav Holst was taught to play the piano and the violin; he enjoyed the former but hated the latter.

Gustav Holst was educated at Cheltenham Grammar School between 1886 and 1891.

Gustav Holst started composing in or about 1886; inspired by Macaulay's poem Horatius he began, but soon abandoned, an ambitious setting of the work for chorus and orchestra.

Gustav Holst's eyes were weak, but no one realized that he needed to wear spectacles.

Gustav Holst's health played a decisive part in his musical future; he had never been strong, and in addition to his asthma and poor eyesight he suffered from neuritis, which made playing the piano difficult.

Gustav Holst said that the affected arm was "like a jelly overcharged with electricity".

On his return, Gustav Holst obtained his first professional appointment, aged seventeen, as organist and choirmaster at Wyck Rissington, Gloucestershire.

In November 1891 Gustav Holst gave what was perhaps his first public performance as a pianist; he and his father played the Brahms Hungarian Dances at a concert in Cheltenham.

In 1892 Gustav Holst wrote the music for an operetta in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan, Lansdown Castle, or The Sorcerer of Tewkesbury.

Gustav Holst applied for a scholarship at the Royal College of Music in London, but the composition scholarship for that year was won by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Gustav Holst was accepted as a non-scholarship student, and Adolph borrowed £100 to cover the first year's expenses.

Gustav Holst secured an occasional engagement in symphony concerts, playing in 1897 under the baton of Richard Strauss at the Queen's Hall.

Gustav Holst had recoiled from the music of Gotterdammerung when he heard it at Covent Garden in 1892, but encouraged by his friend and fellow-student Fritz Hart he persevered and quickly became an ardent Wagnerite.

Gustav Holst respected Stanford, describing him to a fellow-pupil, Herbert Howells, as "the one man who could get any one of us out of a technical mess", but he found that his fellow students, rather than the faculty members, had the greater influence on his development.

In 1895, shortly after celebrating his twenty-first birthday, Gustav Holst met Ralph Vaughan Williams, who became a lifelong friend and had more influence on Gustav Holst's music than anybody else.

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In 1949 he wrote of their relationship, "Gustav Holst declared that his music was influenced by that of his friend: the converse is certainly true.

In Vaughan Williams's words, "It was now that Gustav Holst discovered the feeling of unity with his fellow men which made him afterwards a great teacher.

Gustav Holst's ideals were influenced by Morris's but had a different emphasis.

Gustav Holst said, "'Aristocracy in art'—art is not for all but only for the chosen few—but the only way to find those few is to bring art to everyone—then the artists have a sort of masonic signal by which they recognise each other in the crowd.

Gustav Holst fell in love with her; she was at first unimpressed by him, but she came round and they were engaged, though with no immediate prospect of marriage given Holst's tiny income.

Occasional successes notwithstanding, Gustav Holst found that "man cannot live by composition alone"; he took posts as organist at various London churches, and continued playing the trombone in theatre orchestras.

Gustav Holst's salary was only just enough to live on, and he supplemented it by playing in a popular orchestra called the "White Viennese Band", conducted by Stanislas Wurm.

Gustav Holst enjoyed playing for Wurm, and learned much from him about drawing rubato from players.

Gustav Holst taught at the Passmore Edwards Settlement, where among other innovations he gave the British premieres of two Bach cantatas.

Gustav Holst persevered, and gradually built up a class of dedicated music-lovers.

Gustav Holst never sought to impose his own ideas on his composition pupils.

Gustav Holst frequently took away [because of] his abhorrence of unessentials.

Gustav Holst set poetry by Thomas Hardy and Robert Bridges and, a particular influence, Walt Whitman, whose words he set in "Dirge for Two Veterans" and The Mystic Trumpeter.

Gustav Holst found the existing English versions of the texts unconvincing, and decided to make his own translations, despite his lack of skills as a linguist.

Gustav Holst enrolled in 1909 at University College, London, to study the language.

Gustav Holst described its performance at the Queen's Hall in 1910 as "my first real success".

Gustav Holst walked extensively in England, Italy, France and Algeria.

Gustav Holst again went travelling, accepting an invitation from H Balfour Gardiner to join him and the brothers Clifford and Arnold Bax in Spain.

Gustav Holst cast his friends' horoscopes for the rest of his life and referred to astrology as his "pet vice".

At Thaxted, Gustav Holst became friendly with the Rev Conrad Noel, known as the "Red Vicar", who supported the Independent Labour Party and espoused many causes unpopular with conservative opinion.

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Gustav Holst became an occasional organist and choirmaster at Thaxted Parish Church; he developed an interest in bell-ringing.

Gustav Holst started an annual music festival at Whitsuntide in 1916; students from Morley College and St Paul's Girls' School performed together with local participants.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Gustav Holst tried to enlist but was rejected as unfit for military service.

Gustav Holst felt frustrated that he could not contribute to the war effort.

Gustav Holst's wife became a volunteer ambulance driver; Vaughan Williams went on active service to France as did Holst's brother Emil; Holst's friends the composers George Butterworth and Cecil Coles were killed in battle.

Gustav Holst continued to teach and compose; he worked on The Planets and prepared his chamber opera Savitri for performance.

In 1918, as the war neared its end, Gustav Holst finally had the prospect of a job that offered him the chance to serve.

Gustav Holst formally changed "von Holst" to "Holst" by deed poll in September 1918.

Gustav Holst was appointed as the YMCA's musical organiser for the Near East, based in Salonica.

Five months later, when Gustav Holst was in Greece, Boult introduced The Planets to the general public, at a concert in February 1919; Gustav Holst sent him a long letter full of suggestions, but failed to convince him that the suite should be played in full.

Gustav Holst enjoyed his time in Salonica, from where he was able to visit Athens, which greatly impressed him.

Gustav Holst seemed to make a good recovery, and he felt up to accepting an invitation to the US, lecturing and conducting at the University of Michigan.

In 1927 Gustav Holst was commissioned by the New York Symphony Orchestra to write a symphony.

The day after the American performance, Gustav Holst conducted the City of Birmingham Orchestra in the British premiere.

Towards the end of his life Gustav Holst wrote the Choral Fantasia and he was commissioned by the BBC to write a piece for military band; the resulting prelude and scherzo Hammersmith was a tribute to the place where he had spent most of his life.

Gustav Holst wrote a score for a British film, The Bells, and was amused to be recruited as an extra in a crowd scene.

Gustav Holst wrote a "jazz band piece" that Imogen later arranged for orchestra as Capriccio.

Gustav Holst enjoyed his time at Harvard, but was taken ill while there: a duodenal ulcer prostrated him for some weeks.

Gustav Holst returned to England, joined briefly by his brother for a holiday together in the Cotswolds.

Gustav Holst's health declined, and he withdrew further from musical activities.

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Gustav Holst died in London on 25 May 1934, at the age of 59, of heart failure following an operation on his ulcer.

Gustav Holst's ashes were interred at Chichester Cathedral in Sussex, close to the memorial to Thomas Weelkes, his favourite Tudor composer.

Many of the characteristics that Gustav Holst employed — unconventional time signatures, rising and falling scales, ostinato, bitonality and occasional polytonality — set him apart from other English composers.

Vaughan Williams remarked that Gustav Holst always said in his music what he wished to say, directly and concisely; "He was not afraid of being obvious when the occasion demanded, nor did he hesitate to be remote when remoteness expressed his purpose".

However, as an experienced instrumentalist and orchestra member, Gustav Holst understood music from the standpoint of his players and made sure that, however challenging, their parts were always practicable.

Instead, as Gustav Holst recognised afterwards, his encounter with Purcell's Dido and Aeneas prompted his searching for a "musical idiom of the English language"; the folksong revival became a further catalyst for Gustav Holst to seek inspiration from other sources during the first decade or so of the new century.

Imogen Gustav Holst has acknowledged Gustav Holst's own suggestion: "[O]ne ought to follow Wagner until he leads you to fresh things".

Gustav Holst wrote two suites for military band, in E flat and F major (1911) respectively, the first of which became and remains a brass-band staple.

In 1912 Gustav Holst composed two psalm settings, in which he experimented with plainsong; the same year saw the enduringly popular St Paul's Suite, and the failure of his large scale orchestral work Phantastes.

Gustav Holst conceived the idea of The Planets in 1913, partly as a result of his interest in astrology, and from his determination, despite the failure of Phantastes, to produce a large-scale orchestral work.

Gustav Holst began composing The Planets in 1914; the movements appeared not quite in their final sequence; "Mars" was the first to be written, followed by "Venus" and "Jupiter".

In "Venus", Gustav Holst incorporated music from an abandoned vocal work, A Vigil of Pentecost, to provide the opening; the prevalent mood within the movement is of peaceful resignation and nostalgia.

Gustav Holst downplayed such music as "a limited form of art" in which "mannerisms are almost inevitable"; the composer Alan Gibbs, however, believes Gustav Holst's set at least equal to Vaughan Williams's Five English Folk Songs of 1913.

The words are from a Gnostic text, the apocryphal Acts of John, using a translation from the Greek which Gustav Holst prepared with assistance from Clifford Bax and Jane Joseph.

Warrack refers to its aloof tranquillity; Imogen Gustav Holst believed the Ode expressed Gustav Holst's private attitude to death.

Gustav Holst's libretto attracted much criticism, although Edwin Evans remarked on the rare treat in opera of being able to hear the words being sung.

Apart from his final uncompleted symphony, Gustav Holst's remaining works were for small forces; the eight Canons of 1932 were dedicated to his pupils, though in Imogen's view that they present a formidable challenge to the most professional of singers.

Warrack emphasises that Gustav Holst acquired an instinctive understanding—perhaps more so than any English composer—of the importance of folksong.

Gustav Holst did not found or lead a school of composition; nevertheless, he exercised influences over both contemporaries and successors.

Above all, Short recognises Gustav Holst as a composer for the people, who believed it was a composer's duty to provide music for practical purposes—festivals, celebrations, ceremonies, Christmas carols or simple hymn tunes.

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Gustav Holst's birthplace, 4 Pittville Terrace in Pittville, Cheltenham, is a Gustav Holst museum and is open to visitors.