The Planets, Op. 32, is a seven-movement orchestral suite by the English composer Gustav Holst, written between 1914 and 1917. In the last movement the orchestra is joined by a wordless female chorus. Each movement of the suite is named after a planet of the Solar System and its supposed astrological character.
The premiere of The Planets was at the Queen's Hall, London, on 29 September 1918, conducted by Holst's friend Adrian Boult before an invited audience of about 250 people. Three concerts at which movements from the suite were played were given in 1919 and early 1920. The first complete performance at a public concert was given at the Queen's Hall on 15 November 1920 by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates.
The innovative nature of Holst's music caused some initial hostility among a minority of critics, but the suite quickly became and has remained popular, influential and widely performed. The composer conducted two recordings of the work, and it has been recorded at least 80 times subsequently by conductors, choirs and orchestras from the UK and internationally.
Background and composition
Holst c. 1921
The Planets was composed over nearly three years, between 1914 and 1917.[1][2] The work had its origins in March and April 1913, when Gustav Holst and his friend and benefactor Balfour Gardiner holidayed in Spain with the composer Arnold Bax and his brother, the author Clifford Bax. A discussion about astrology piqued Holst's interest in the subject. Clifford Bax later commented that Holst became "a remarkably skilled interpreter of horoscopes".[3] Shortly after the holiday Holst wrote to a friend: "I only study things that suggest music to me. That's why I worried at Sanskrit.[n 1] Then recently the character of each planet suggested lots to me, and I have been studying astrology fairly closely".[5] He told Clifford Bax in 1926 that The Planets:
... whether it’s good or bad, grew in my mind slowly—like a baby in a woman's womb ... For two years I had the intention of composing that cycle, and during those two years it seemed of itself more and more definitely to be taking form.[6]
Imogen Holst, the composer's daughter, wrote that her father had difficulty with large-scale orchestral structures such as symphonies, and the idea of a suite with a separate character for each movement was an inspiration to him.[7] Holst's biographer Michael Short and the musicologist Richard Greene both think it likely that another inspiration for the composer to write a suite for large orchestra was the example of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra.[8][n 2] That suite had been performed in London in 1912 and again in 1914; Holst was at one of the performances,[7] and he is known to have owned a copy of the score.[9]
Holst described The Planets as "a series of mood pictures", acting as "foils to one another", with "very little contrast in any one of them".[10] Short writes that some of the characteristics the composer attributed to the planets may have been suggested by Alan Leo's booklet What Is a Horoscope?, which he was reading at the time.[11] Holst took the title of two movements – "Mercury, the Winged Messenger" and "Neptune, the Mystic" – from Leo's books.[12] But although astrology was Holst's starting point, he arranged the planets to suit his own plan:
... ignoring some important astrological factors such as the influence of the sun and the moon, and attributing certain non-astrological qualities to each planet. Nor is the order of movements the same as that of the planets' orbits round the sun; his only criterion being that of maximum musical effectiveness.[11]
In an early sketch for the suite Holst listed Mercury as "no. 1", which Greene suggests raises the possibility that the composer's first idea was simply to depict the planets in the obvious order, from nearest the sun to the farthest. "However, opening with the more disturbing character of Mars allows a more dramatic and compelling working out of the musical material".[13]
Holst had a heavy workload as head of music at St Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith, and director of music at Morley College,[14] and had limited time for composing. Imogen Holst wrote, "Weekends and holidays were the only times when he could really get on with his own work, which is why it took him over two years to finish The Planets". She added that Holst's chronic neuritis in his right arm was troubling him considerably and he would have found it impossible to complete the 198 pages of the large full score without the help of two colleagues at St Paul's, Vally Lasker and Nora Day, whom he called his "scribes".[15]
The first movement to be written was Mars in mid-1914, followed by Venus and Jupiter in the latter part of the year, Saturn and Uranus in mid-1915, Neptune later in 1915 and Mercury in early 1916. Holst completed the orchestration during 1917.[1]
First performances
Just before the Armistice, Gustav Holst burst into my office: "Adrian, the YMCA are sending me to Salonika quite soon and Balfour Gardiner, bless his heart, has given me a parting present consisting of the Queen's Hall, full of the Queen's Hall Orchestra for the whole of a Sunday morning. So we're going to do The Planets, and you've got to conduct."
The premiere of The Planets, conducted at Holst's request by Adrian Boult, was held at short notice on 29September 1918, during the last weeks of the First World War, in the Queen's Hall with the financial support of Gardiner. It was hastily rehearsed; the musicians of the Queen's Hall Orchestra first saw the complicated music only two hours before the performance, and the choir for Neptune was recruited from Holst's students at Morley College and St Paul's Girls' School.[17] It was a comparatively intimate affair, attended by around 250 invited associates, but Holst regarded it as the public premiere, inscribing Boult's copy of the score, "This copy is the property of Adrian Boult who first caused the Planets to shine in public and thereby earned the gratitude of Gustav Holst."[16]
Adrian Boult, "who first caused the Planets to shine in public"
At a Royal Philharmonic Society concert at the Queen's Hall on 27 February 1919 conducted by Boult, five of the seven movements were played in the order Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, and Jupiter.[18] It was Boult's decision not to play all seven movements at this concert. Although Holst would have liked the suite to be played complete, Boult's view was that when the public were being presented with a completely new language of this kind, "half an hour of it was as much as they could take in".[19] Imogen Holst recalled that her father "hated incomplete performances of The Planets, though on several occasions he had to agree to conduct three or four movements at Queen's Hall concerts. He particularly disliked having to finish with Jupiter, to make a 'happy ending', for, as he himself said, 'in the real world the end is not happy at all'".[20]
At a Queen's Hall concert on 22 November 1919, Holst conducted Venus, Mercury and Jupiter.[n 3] There was another incomplete public performance, in Birmingham, on 10 October 1920, with five movements (Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter), conducted by the composer.[22] The first complete performance of the suite at a public concert was on 15 November 1920; the London Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Albert Coates.[n 4] The first complete performance conducted by the composer was on 13 October 1923, with the Queen's Hall Orchestra.[24]
Instrumentation
The work is scored for a large orchestra. Holst's fellow composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote in 1920, "Holst uses a very large orchestra in the Planets not to make his score look impressive, but because he needs the extra tone colour and knows how to use it".[25] The score calls for the following instrumentation. The movements vary in the combinations of instruments used.
In Neptune, two three-part women's choruses (each comprising two soprano sections and one alto section) located in an adjoining room which is to be screened from the audience are added.
Mars is marked allegro and is in a relentless 5 4ostinato for most of its duration. It opens quietly, the first two bars played by percussion, harp and col legno strings.[28] The music builds to a quadruple-forte, dissonant climax.[29] Although Mars is often thought to portray the horrors of mechanised warfare, it was completed before the First World War started. The composer Colin Matthews writes that for Holst, Mars would have been "an experiment in rhythm and clashing keys", and its violence in performance "may have surprised him as much as it galvanised its first audiences".[30] Short comments, "harmonic dissonances abound, often resulting from clashes between moving chords and static pedal-points", which he compares to a similar effect at the end of Stravinsky'sThe Firebird, and adds that although battle music had been written before, notably by Richard Strauss in Ein Heldenleben, "it had never expressed such violence and sheer terror".[31]
2. Venus, the Bringer of Peace
Opening bars
The second movement begins adagio in 4 4.[32] According to Imogen Holst, Venus "has to try and bring the right answer to Mars".[33] The movement opens with a solo horn theme answered quietly by the flutes and oboes. A second theme is given to solo violin. The music proceeds tranquilly with oscillating chords from flutes and harps, with decoration from the celesta.[33] Between the opening adagio and the central largo there is a flowing andante section in 3 4 with a violin melody (solo then tutti) accompanied by gentle syncopation in the woodwind. The oboe solo in the central largo is one of the last romantic melodies Holst allowed himself before turning to a more austere manner in later works.[33] Leo called the planet "the most fortunate star under which to be born";[34] Short calls Holst's Venus "one of the most sublime evocations of peace in music".[35]
3. Mercury, the Winged Messenger
Mercury is in 6 8 and is marked vivace throughout.[36] The composer R. O. Morris thought it the nearest of the movements to "the domain of programme music pure and simple ... it is essentially pictorial in idea. Mercury is a mere activity whose character is not defined".[37] This movement, the last of the seven to be written, contains Holst's first experiments with bitonality.[38] He juxtaposes melodic fragments in B♭ major and E major, in a fast-moving scherzo. Solo violin, high-pitched harp, flute and glockenspiel are prominently featured. It is the shortest of the seven movements, typically taking between 3+1⁄2 and 4 minutes in performance.[39]
4. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
In this movement Holst portrays Jupiter's supposedly characteristic "abundance of life and vitality" with music that is buoyant and exuberant.[11] Nobility and generosity are allegedly characteristics of those born under Jupiter, and in the slower middle section Holst provides a broad tune embodying those traits.[11] In the view of Imogen Holst, it has been compromised by its later use as the melody for a solemn patriotic hymn, "I Vow to Thee, My Country";[14][n 5] the musicologist Lewis Foreman comments that the composer did not think of it in those terms, as shown by his own recordings of the movement.[40] The opening section of the movement is marked allegrogiocoso, in 2 4 time.[41] The second theme, at the same tempo, is in 3 4 time, as is the broad melody of the middle section, marked andantemaestoso, which Holst marks to be taken at half the speed of the opening section.[42] The opening section returns and after a reappearance of the maestoso tune – its expected final cadence unresolved, as in its first appearance – the movement ends with a triple fortequaver chord for the full orchestra.[43]
5. Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
Saturn was Holst's favourite movement of the suite.[30] Matthews describes it as "a slow processional which rises to a frightening climax before fading away as if into the outer reaches of space".[30] The movement opens as a quiet adagio in 4 4 and the basic pace remains slow throughout, with short bursts of animato in the first part and a switch to andante in 3 2 in the later section.[44] Apart from the timpani no percussion is used in this movement except for tubular bells at climactic points.[45] At the beginning, flutes, bassoons and harps play a theme suggesting a ticking clock.[45] A solemn melody is introduced by the trombones (Holst's own main instrument) and taken up by the full orchestra.[46] A development of the ticking theme leads to a clangorous triple forte climax, after which the music dies away and ends quietly.[47]
6. Uranus, the Magician
Matthews describes the character of the movement as that of "a clumsy dance, which gradually gets more and more out of hand (not unlike Dukas'sSorcerer's Apprentice) until, with what seems like a magic wand, all is abruptly swept away into the far distance".[30][n 6] The movement, which begins with what Short calls "a tremendous four-note brass motif",[48] is marked allegro in 6 4. The music proceeds in "a series of merry pranks" with occasional interjections in 9 4, building to a quadruple forte climax with a prominent organ glissando,[49] after which the music suddenly drops to a pianissimo lento before alternating quick and slow sections bring the movement to its pianissimo conclusion.[50]
7. Neptune, the Mystic
Opening bars: piccolo (top), 2 flutes, bass flute, oboes
The music of the last movement is quiet throughout, in a swaying, irregular metre, opening with flutes joined by piccolo and oboes, with harps and celesta prominent later. Holst makes much use of dissonance in this movement. Before the premiere his colleague Geoffrey Toye said that a bar where the brass play chords of E minor and G♯ minor together was "going to sound frightful". Holst agreed, and said it had made him shudder when he wrote it down but, "What are you to do when they come like that?"[51] As the movement develops, the orchestra is joined by an offstage female chorus singing a soft wordless line: this was unusual in orchestral works at the time, although Debussy had used the same device in his Nocturnes (1900).[52] The orchestra falls silent and the unaccompanied voices bring the work to a pianissimo conclusion in an uncertain tonality, as a door between the singers and the auditorium is gradually closed.[n 7]
Reception
Holst's inscription on Boult's copy of the score
Imogen Holst wrote of the 1918 premiere under Boult:
Even those listeners who had studied the score for months were taken aback by the unexpected clamour of Mars. During Jupiter the charwomen working in the corridors put down their scrubbing-brushes and began to dance. In Saturn the isolated listeners in the dark, half-empty hall felt themselves growing older at every bar. But it was the end of Neptune that was unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women's voices growing fainter and fainter in the distance, until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence.[55]
When the music was first introduced to the general public in February 1919, critical opinion was divided. Greene prints a summary of reviews of the first four public performances of the suite (or movements from it) in February and November 1919 and October and November 1920. Positive reviews are recorded in 28 of the 37 papers, magazines and journals cited.[56] A small minority of reviewers were particularly hostile, among them those of The Globe ("Noisy and pretentious)";[57]The Sunday Times ("Pompous, noisy and unalluring"),[58] and The Times ("a great disappointment … elaborately contrived and painful to hear").[n 8] The critic in The Saturday Review wrote that Holst evidently regarded the planets "as objectionable nuisances that he would oust from our orbit if he could".[60]
The Times rapidly changed its mind; in July 1919 it called Holst the most intriguing of his compeers and commented, "The Planets still leaves us gasping";[61] after hearing Holst conduct three of the movements in November 1919 the paper's critic declared the piece "the first music by an Englishman we have heard for some time which is neither conventional nor negligible",[58] and by the time of Holst's death in 1934 the paper's assessment of the piece was "Holst's greatest work":
Each of the seven numbers shows one aspect of life regarded with a detached and unflinching scrutiny. In this suite Holst, with the directness which was characteristic of his personal intercourse and character, and which comes out in spite of all his mysticism in the technique of his music, sets forth with every elaboration his fundamentally simple view of what life brings. The work is original in conception, in its philosophical implications, in its scoring, and in its harmonic and rhythmic idiom.[62]
The Sunday Times, too, quickly changed its line. In 1920 its new music critic, Ernest Newman, said that Holst could do "easily, without a fuss" what some other composers could only do "with an effort and a smirk", and that in The Planets he showed "one of the subtlest and most original minds of our time. It begins working at a musical problem where most other minds would leave off".[63] Newman compared Holst's harmonic innovations to those of Stravinsky, to the latter's disadvantage, and expressed none of the reservations that qualified his admiration of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra.[58]
There have been at least 80 commercial recordings of The Planets.[64] Holst conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the first two recorded performances: the first was an acoustic recording made in sessions between September 1922 and November 1923;[65] the second was made in 1926 using the new electrical recording process.[66] Holst's tempi are in general faster than those of most of his successors on record. This may have been due to the need to fit the music on 78 rpm discs, although later 78 versions are slower. Holst's later recording is quicker than the acoustic version, possibly because the electrical process required wider grooves, reducing the available playing time.[67] Other, slower, recordings from the 78 era include those conducted by Leopold Stokowski (1943)[68] and Sir Adrian Boult (1945).[69] Recordings from the LP age are also typically longer than the composer's, but from the digital era a 2010 recording by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski is quicker than Holst's acoustic version and comes close to matching his 1926 speeds, and in two movements (Venus and Uranus) surpasses them.[70] There were no commercial recordings of the work in the 1930s; timings are given below of a recording representing each subsequent decade up to the 2020s:
There have been many adaptations of the suite, and several attempts to add an eighth planet – Pluto – in the time between its discovery in 1930 and its downgrading to "dwarf planet" in 2006. The most prominent of these was Matthews's 2000 composition, "Pluto, the Renewer", commissioned by the Hallé Orchestra. Dedicated posthumously to Imogen Holst, it was first performed in Manchester on 11 May 2000, with Kent Nagano conducting. Matthews changed the ending of Neptune slightly so that the movement would segue into Pluto.[72] Matthews's Pluto has been recorded, coupled with Holst's suite, on at least four occasions.[n 9] Others who have produced versions of Pluto for The Planets include Leonard Bernstein and Jun Nagao.[74]
The suite has been adapted for numerous instruments and instrumental combinations, including organ, synthesiser, brass band, and jazz orchestra.[75] Holst used the melody of the central section of "Jupiter" for a setting ("Thaxted") of the hymn "I Vow to Thee, My Country" in 1921.[n 5]
The Planets has been taken as an influence by various rock bands, and for film scores such as those for the Star Wars series. There have been numerous references to the suite in popular culture, from films to television and computer games.[79]
Notes, references and sources
Notes
↑ Holst's earlier interest in Sanskrit texts, particularly the Rig Veda hymns, had led him to study the language and to compose several works based on Sanskrit texts.[4]
↑ Short and the musicologist David Lambourn both comment that Holst's original title for his suite was "Seven Pieces for Large Orchestra".[9]
↑ This was the first public performance of Venus.[21]
↑ This was the first time Neptune was heard in a public performance.[23]
1 2 In 1986 Imogen Holst wrote that "[f]or more than half a century, the main problem in Jupiter has been the difficulty of avoiding unwanted associations with the hymn".[76] Holst's closest friend, Ralph Vaughan Williams,[77] was, inadvertently, partly to blame for the use of the tune as a solemn hymn. He had suggested that Cecil Spring-Rice's verse should be set to music, and Holst was asked to undertake the job. Being overworked and exhausted at the time, Holst, spotting that the words fitted the maestoso tune from Jupiter, repurposed that rather than write a new one.[78]
↑ Short writes that despite reminiscences of the Pan motif in Ravel'sDaphnis et Chloé and of Berlioz'sSymphonie fantastique and the "Infernal Dance" in Stravinsky's The Firebird the main influence on the movement is clearly The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which was first performed in London in 1899 and was "doubtless well known to Holst".[48]
↑ The choir sings alternating C minor and E major chords, and the musician David Owen Norris has commented that as the door shuts it is pure chance whether the last chord heard is C minor (looking back at the key of Mars) or E.[53] In a 2014 article William Weir suggests that the closing bars of Neptune are an early precursor of the electronic fade-out that became ubiquitous in recordings of popular music in the 1950s to the 1980s.[54]
Gustav Theodore Holst was an English composer, arranger and teacher. Best known for his orchestral suite The Planets, he composed many other works across a range of genres, although none achieved comparable success. His distinctive compositional style was the product of many influences, Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss being most crucial early in his development. The subsequent inspiration of the English folksong revival of the early 20th century, and the example of such rising modern composers as Maurice Ravel, led Holst to develop and refine an individual style.
Sir Adrian Cedric Boult, CH was a British conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family, he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. His first prominent post was conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1924. When the British Broadcasting Corporation appointed him director of music in 1930, he established the BBC Symphony Orchestra and became its chief conductor. The orchestra set standards of excellence that were rivalled in Britain only by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), founded two years later.
"I Vow to Thee, My Country" is a British patriotic hymn, created in 1921 when music by Gustav Holst had a poem by Sir Cecil Spring Rice set to it. The music originated as a wordless melody, which Holst later named "Thaxted", taken from the "Jupiter" movement of Holst's 1917 suite The Planets.
Imogen Clare Holst was a British composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, musicologist, and festival administrator. The only child of the composer Gustav Holst, she is particularly known for her educational work at Dartington Hall in the 1940s, and for her 20 years as joint artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. In addition to composing music, she wrote composer biographies, much educational material, and several books on the life and works of her father.
Thomas Appleby Matthews was an English conductor and organist.
The First Suite in E♭ for Military Band, Op. 28, No. 1 is written by the English composer Gustav Holst. It is considered one of the cornerstone masterworks in the concert band repertoire. Officially premiered in 1920 at the Royal Military School of Music, the manuscript was originally completed in 1909. Along with the subsequent Second Suite in F for Military Band, written in 1911 and premiered in 1922, the First Suite convinced many other prominent composers that serious music could be written specifically for band.
Sāvitri is a chamber opera in one act with music composed by Gustav Holst, his Opus 25, to his own libretto. The story is based on the episode of Savitri and Satyavan from the Mahābhārata, which was also included in Specimens of Old Indian Poetry and Idylls from the Sanskrit. The opera features three solo singers, a wordless female chorus, and a chamber orchestra of 12 musicians. Holst had made at least six earlier attempts at composing opera before arriving at Sāvitri.
Gustav Holst's Brook Green Suite, H. 190, was written in 1933 for St Paul's Girls' School junior orchestra for strings and consists of 3 movements.
The Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16, were composed by Arnold Schoenberg in 1909, and first performed in London in 1912. The titles of the pieces, reluctantly added by the composer after the work's completion upon the request of his publisher, are as follows:
Jane Marian Joseph was an English composer, arranger and music teacher. She was a pupil and later associate of the composer Gustav Holst, and was instrumental in the organisation and management of various of the music festivals which Holst sponsored. Many of her works were composed for performance at these festivals and similar occasions. Her early death at age 35, which prevented the full realisation of her talents, was considered by her contemporaries as a considerable loss to English music.
Beni Mora is a three-movement suite of music in E minor for large orchestra, by Gustav Holst. The first performance was at the Queen's Hall, London, on 1 May 1912, conducted by the composer. The work was inspired by music Holst heard in Algeria during a holiday in 1908. The constant repetition of one theme from Arabic folk music in the last movement has been described as a precursor of modern minimalism. The piece also includes dance rhythms and wistful, slow sections, and makes strong use of woodwinds and percussion. Beni Mora has been recorded several times by British orchestras, most recently in 2011.
Egdon Heath, Op. 47, H. 172, subtitled "A Homage to Thomas Hardy", is a tone poem by Gustav Holst, written in 1927. Holst considered it his most perfectly realised composition.
This is a summary of 1920 in music in the United Kingdom.
A Moorside Suite (H.173) is a work for brass band by the English composer Gustav Holst. It was commissioned by the BBC and the National Brass Band Festival Committee in 1927 for the final of the 1928 National Brass Band Championships of Great Britain at Crystal Palace. The suite comprises three movements - Scherzo, Nocturne and March.
Gustav Holst's suite The Planets has been the subject of frequent adaptations and additions, and many later works, particularly in popular music, have been derived from it. There are numerous references to the suite in popular culture.
Hammersmith: Prelude and Scherzo, more commonly known as just Hammersmith, Op. 52, is a wind band work composed by English composer Gustav Holst in 1930, with a corresponding orchestral version. Commissioned by the BBC Military Band, the piece is based on Holst's love for the London borough of Hammersmith. The writing is more musically challenging than Holst's other wind band works, and is a wind band essential today. A typical performance runs for 14 minutes.
The Double Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra is a work by Gustav Holst in three movements played without a break. It was written in 1929 and first performed in 1930 by its dedicatees, the sisters Adila Fachiri and Jelly d'Arányi. Though now praised by many critics, it has never been frequently performed in the concert hall. It is characterized by fugal counterpoint, folk-like melody, and bitonality without dissonance.
The Lyric Movement for viola and small orchestra is a short concertante work by Gustav Holst. It was one of his last compositions, being written in 1933. It was first performed in 1934, the year of his death, by its dedicatee, the violist Lionel Tertis, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult. Though its early performers found the Lyric Movement too austere for their tastes, it has more recently been considered one of Holst's most successful later works. It has been recorded several times.
A Fugal Overture, Op. 40/1, H 151, is a short concert overture for full orchestra by the English composer Gustav Holst. It was written in 1922 and first performed in 1923, and is a very early example of musical neoclassicism. Though there were conflicting opinions from Holst's contemporaries about the work's merits, it has since come to be considered an attractive and exciting, if slight, example of Holst's later style.
A Fugal Concerto by the English composer Gustav Holst is a short concerto in three movements for flute, oboe and string orchestra. It was composed and first performed in 1923. Influenced by the counterpoint of J. S. Bach, it is an early example of neoclassicism. Early reviews of the concerto were mixed, but it has since come to be seen as an attractive, if slight, example of Holst's neoclassical style, and it has been recorded many times.
↑ Norris, David Owen. "The Planets"Archived 4 February 2024 at the Wayback Machine , Building a Library, BBC Radio 3 podcast, retrieved 9 July 2021. Event occurs at 46m 15s
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