Gustav Holst

Despite dying in 1934, Gustav Holst ranks among the handful of classical composers whose output left a deep mark on rock and popular music across the mid- and late-twentieth century. He belonged to the post-Romantic generation of English composers that included his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams; together they promoted a distinctly English orchestral idiom well beyond national borders, while Holst’s own scores drew additional depth from Eastern traditions that set them apart. Born in Cheltenham in 1874, he endured an early life marked by fragile health, notably neuritis that crippled his right hand, the loss of his mother at age eight, and the high expectations of a stern father. At the Royal College of Music he later took up the trombone to support himself in the closing years of the 1890s, and around the same time he began composing while exploring Hindu teachings—an interest that later prompted him to study Sanskrit and shaped several of his most original works. For years he remained little known as a composer, supporting himself through teaching until the first decade of the twentieth century, when he discovered English folksong. Thereafter his music drew on two principal wellsprings: the folk tradition and Eastern philosophy and musical color.

During the 1910s Holst produced the score that would sustain his reputation long after his death and influence generations of film composers as well as rock musicians. Inspired by astrology, the orchestral suite The Planets became his first composition to reach a wide and receptive public. Finished in 1917 and gaining momentum in the immediate postwar years, the work absorbed an unusually broad range of sources—recent wartime events, seven decades of Romantic orchestral practice, English folk and patriotic strains, and an idiosyncratic blend of mysticism and idealism. It also proved one of the most brilliant orchestral showpieces ever conceived and quickly became the cornerstone of Holst’s catalogue as well as one of the most frequently performed orchestral compositions in existence. The composer himself conducted it twice for the gramophone, first in an acoustic version in the early 1920s and again with electrical recording technology in the middle of the decade; subsequent recordings proliferated from the 1930s onward, and the introduction of the LP, followed by stereo, heightened its appeal as a sonic spectacular. The space race of the 1960s further amplified its popularity, and by decade’s end passages from the suite occasionally accompanied college listeners experimenting with psychedelics alongside such densely orchestrated albums as Days of Future Passed and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band, much as Richard Strauss’s music had been linked in advertisements for 2001: A Space Odyssey as “the ultimate trip.”

By the close of the 1960s, several ambitious rock groups had begun incorporating material from The Planets into their own pieces. King Crimson wove the thunderous opening movement “Mars, Bringer of War” into the suite “The Devil’s Triangle” on their second album, In the Wake of Poseidon, having already performed “Mars” live since early 1969, although they were never granted formal permission to adapt the music. Holst’s daughter Imogen, herself a composer, teacher, and conductor, joined forces with the publisher to protect her father’s legacy and refused any rock arrangements that might compromise its standing. By the end of the 1970s, however, demand from the rock audience could no longer be dismissed, resulting in two markedly different Moog-synthesizer versions of The Planets. Isao Tomita’s elaborate, effects-laden account on RCA so displeased the publisher and Imogen Holst that release in England was prohibited, whereas Patrick Gleason’s more straightforward reading appeared on Mercury Records. Around the same period Holst’s influence extended prominently into film scoring. As early as 1957 Bernard Herrmann’s music for Alfred Hitchcock’s black comedy The Trouble With Harry revealed clear debts to The Planets, especially “Uranus, The Magician,” while in 1977 John Williams’s score for Star Wars drew equally on Holst, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Max Steiner. As of 2004 dozens of recordings remained in circulation, and one English composer has since supplied an eighth movement, “Pluto,” the planet having been unknown when the suite was written.

Holst’s music has also left traces in the Beatles’ work. Although it is improbable that any member of the group ever encountered Holst’s St. Paul’s Suite, their producer George Martin certainly knew the score intimately. While finishing “All You Need Is Love” in 1967, Martin inserted a quotation of the folk tune “Greensleeves” drawn from the suite’s finale, employing it as a countersubject during the fade-out—the same device the composer had used decades earlier.