66 Facts About Imogen Holst

Imogen Clare Holst was a British composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, musicologist, and festival administrator.

From a young age, Imogen Holst showed precocious talent in composing and performance.

Unable to follow her initial ambitions to be a pianist or a dancer for health reasons, Imogen Holst spent most of the 1930s teaching, and as a full-time organiser for the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

Imogen Holst was appointed CBE in 1975 and received numerous academic honours.

Imogen Holst died at Aldeburgh and is buried in the churchyard there.

Imogen Holst was born on 12 April 1907 at 31 Grena Road, Richmond, a riverside town to the west of London.

Imogen Holst's parents were Gustav Theodore Holst, an aspiring composer then working as a music teacher, and Isobel, nee Harrison.

Imogen Holst was immediately attracted to her, and they were married on 22 July 1901.

When Imogen Holst was still very small the family moved from Richmond to a small house by the river in nearby Barnes, which they rented from a relative.

In 1917 Imogen Holst began boarding at Eothen, a small, private school for girls in Caterham, where Jane Joseph, Gustav's star pupil from SPGS, taught music.

At the school, Imogen Holst studied piano with Eleanor Shuttleworth, violin with Andre Mangeot and theory with Jane Joseph.

Imogen Holst left Eothen in December 1920 hoping to study under Ruby Ginner at the Ginner-Mawer School of Dance and Drama, but was rejected on health grounds, although there appeared to be no significant medical issue.

Imogen Holst then studied at home under a governess, while waiting to start at St Paul's Girls School in the autumn.

In September 1921 Imogen Holst began at St Paul's Girls School, and became a boarder from Spring 1922.

Imogen Holst took her first steps towards personal independence when she moved from the family home to a bedsit near Kensington Gardens.

Imogen Holst spent much of the period between September 1930 and May 1931 travelling.

Imogen Holst disliked the disciplines imposed by an unsympathetic and unyielding superior, but stayed until the end of the year, by which time Citizen House had relocated to Hampstead.

Imogen Holst worked briefly as a freelance conductor and accompanist before joining the staff of the EFDS early in 1932.

Imogen Holst privately determined that she would establish and protect her father's musical legacy.

Back in England, Imogen Holst worked on recorder arrangements of music by the neglected 17th-century composer Pelham Humphrey.

In 1938 Imogen Holst decided to abandon amateur music-making and teaching to concentrate on her own professional development.

Imogen Holst resigned her EFDSS post while continuing to honour existing commitments to the organisation.

Imogen Holst had given up her work at Roedean in 1936; at Easter 1939 she resigned from Eothen.

Imogen Holst was assigned to cover the west of England, a huge area stretching from Oxfordshire to Cornwall.

Imogen Holst arranged performances by professional groups, and what she termed "drop-in-and-sing" festivals in which anyone could join.

Imogen Holst wrote of "idyllic days" spent over cups of tea, discussing the hopes and dreams of would-be music makers.

In 1938, Imogen Holst had visited Dartington Hall, a progressive school and crafts community near Totnes in Devon, which had been founded in 1925 by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst.

Imogen Holst had in mind a music course, "the sort of thing that your father did in the old days at Morley College".

Imogen Holst's teaching methods, heavily based on "learning by doing" and without formal examinations, at first disconcerted her students and puzzled the school inspectors, but eventually gained acceptance and respect.

Imogen Holst was convinced that Britten was the composer to continue and complete the work of her father in redefining the character of English music.

From 1945, while maintaining her commitment to Dartington, Imogen Holst began to widen her musical activities.

On 23 July 1950 Imogen Holst conducted the premiere of Britten's Five Flower Songs part songs in the open air at Dartington, composed for the 25th wedding anniversary of its owners.

Imogen Holst had attended the first two Aldeburgh Festivals in 1948 and 1949, and in 1950 accepted a commission to provide a choral work for performance at the 1951 festival; The work was the song cycle for female voices and harp, Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow.

When Imogen Holst joined Britten, the financial arrangement was vague; Britten paid her on a piecemeal basis rather than a regular salary, unaware that she had made over her rights to her father's estate to her mother and had little money of her own.

When Britten was under pressure during the composition of his ballet The Prince of the Pagodas, Imogen Holst accompanied him to Switzerland, to remain by his side as he completed the work.

Imogen Holst took great pleasure in her association with Britten's opera for children, Noye's Fludde, for which she showed Britten how to achieve a unique raindrop effect by hitting a row of china mugs with a wooden spoon.

Imogen Holst continued to assist Britten with all his major compositions until 1964, at that point she determined to give priority to the final securing of her father's musical legacy, to re-establish her career as a composer, and to pursue a more independent path.

Imogen Holst relinquished her post as Britten's assistant, while remaining personally devoted to Britten.

Imogen Holst did not leave Aldeburgh, and continued her work with the annual Aldeburgh Festival.

Imogen Holst devised frequent programmes of church music, for performance at Aldeburgh parish church.

Since moving to Aldeburgh in 1952, Imogen Holst had lived in a series of lodgings and rented flats.

In 1964 Imogen Holst began composing again, and in 1965 accepted commissions for two large-scale works: The Sun's Journey, a cantata for female voices, and the Trianon Suite, composed for the Trianon Youth Orchestra of Ipswich.

Between 1966 and 1970 Imogen Holst recorded a number of her father's works with the Purcell Singers and the English Chamber Orchestra, under the Argo and Lyrita labels.

Imogen Holst had formed the Purcell Singers, a small semi-professional choir, in October 1952, largely at the instigation of Pears.

On 2 June 1967 Imogen Holst shared the podium with Britten in the concert inaugurating the Aldeburgh Festival's new home at the Snape Maltings.

From 1972 Imogen Holst was involved with the development of educational classes at the Maltings, which began with weekend singing classes and developed into the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies, with its own training orchestra.

Imogen Holst was unsure that she could maintain a working relationship with Pears alone, and on reaching the age of 70 in 1977, decided she would retire as artistic director after that year's festival.

Imogen Holst made her final festival appearance as a performer when she stood in for the indisposed conductor Andre Previn at the Snape Maltings Training Orchestra's inaugural festival concert.

Gustav Holst's centenary was celebrated in 1974, when Imogen published a Thematic Catalogue of Gustav Holst's Music and founded the Holst Birthplace Museum in Cheltenham.

The centenary was the occasion for the publication of the first volume of a facsimile edition of Gustav Holst's manuscripts, on which Imogen worked with the help of the composer Colin Matthews.

Three more facsimile volumes followed in the years up to 1983, at which point the increasing costs, and Imogen Holst's failing health led to the abandonment of the project.

Apart from her books concerned with her father's life and works, Imogen Holst continued to write on other aspects of music.

Imogen Holst continued to compose, usually short pieces but with occasional larger-scale orchestral works such as the Woodbridge Suite and the Deben Calendar, the latter a series of twelve sketches depicting the River Deben in Suffolk at different phases of the year.

Imogen Holst's last major composition was a String Quintet, written in 1982 and performed in October of that year by the Endellion Quartet, augmented by the cellist Steven Isserlis.

Imogen Holst had intended that, after 1977, her retirement from the Aldeburgh Festival would be total, but she made an exception in 1980 when she organised a 70th birthday celebration concert for Pears.

Shortly after the 1977 Aldeburgh Festival, Imogen Holst became seriously ill with what she described as "a coronary angina".

Imogen Holst died at home of heart failure on 9 March 1984 and was buried in Aldeburgh churchyard five days later in a plot a few yards away from Britten's.

Imogen Holst never married, though she enjoyed a number of romantic friendships, notably with the future poet Miles Tomalin, whom she met when she was a pupil at St Paul's.

Many years after the relationship ended, Imogen Holst admitted to Britten that she would have married Tomalin.

Imogen Holst was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 1966.

Imogen Holst was awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Essex, Exeter, and Leeds.

Imogen Holst was given honorary membership of the Royal Academy of Music in 1970.

Imogen Holst was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1975 New Year Honours for services to music.

Imogen Holst was a part-time composer, intermittently productive within her extensive portfolio of musical activities.

However, for long periods in her subsequent career Imogen Holst barely composed at all.

Imogen Holst was primarily influenced, as Gustav Imogen Holst's daughter, by what the analyst Christopher Tinker terms "her natural and inescapable relationship with the English musical establishment", by her close personal relationship with her father, and her love of folksong.