The Planets

The score of Holst's Planets was finished in 1916 yet the first complete public performance was not given until Albert Coates conducted it at the Queen's Hall in late 1920 . The sequence of events between these dates is fascinating, even touching on two of the NSO's present members, Brian and Fionna Hall. Leila Andrews, Brian's mother, was a close friend and fellow pupil of Holst's daughter Imogen at St. Paul's Girls School, Hammersmith - an establishment with which Holst was associated for almost all of his career. Over sixty years later, Leila Andrews (now Hall) wrote of the excitement of the first two piano performance of The Planets in 1916. "On one never to be forgotten evening we had a Musical Society concert. Our music hall had a flat area at the bottom which took two pianos and a large space for the orchestra. There were tiers of seats in circles going right up nearly to the ceiling. Well - on this special night Vaughan Williams came, and our two piano mistresses (Vally Lasker and Nora Day) played through The Planets on two pianos, before it had been performed in public. I sat just behind VW and "Gussy" as we used to call him, and looked down on them as they sat and shared a score of The Planets. They nudged each other like a couple of big schoolboys, listening avidly to the music; sometimes it was a questioning look - but mostly of pleasurable excitement".

Unlike his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav von Holst was turned down for military service in the First World War on health grounds. In 1917, however, having agreed to drop the "von" from his name, he was appointed Musical Organiser to the troops and posted to Salonika, northern Greece. As a leaving present his colleague, Balfour Gardiner, arranged a very special event - the first orchestral performance of the Planets! Before an invited audience at the Queen's Hall, London, in September 1917, the young Adrian Boult brought Holst's masterpiece fully to life for the first time. Eleven year old Imogen Holst wrote a vivid account of the occasion, "The orchestra rehearsed for just under two hours and then played the work straight through. The two or three hundred friends and fellow musicians in the darkened auditorium realized that this was no ordinary occasion: the music was unlike anything they had ever heard before. They found the clamour of Mars almost unbearable having lived through four years of a war that was still going on. Hearing the voices of the hidden choir growing fainter and fainter, it was impossible to know where the sound ended and silence began". Then, in 1918, Boult gave the first public performance of the Planets but without two of the movements. Explaining this seemingly strange decision, especially as one of the movements was Venus - The Bringer of Peace, surely a token for the times, he said, "I do most strongly feel that when they (the audience) are being given a totally new language like that, thirty minutes of it is as much as they can take in". The 1920 first complete performance, under the baton of Albert Coates, proved that the public could "take it in". The Planets was soon performed in Chicago and New York and, such was the general success of the work, Holst's position of relative obscurity was changed almost overnight into international stardom - he hated it! The sincere artist's dilemma in a nutshell, wanting recognition for his work yet not the inevitable brouhaha associated with success.

It would be impossible to do justice to Holst's life in this short note but his theosophical, astrological and socialist interests reveal a complex, often self-doubting and insecure character. On the other hand, glimpses of his sense of humour and humanity illustrate a kindly man. On one occasion, a heavy teaching schedule, neuritis in his right arm, the effort of composition and sleepless nights due to the birth of his daughter extracted a heavy toll. In a charming letter to the High Mistress of St. Paul's School during a flu epidemic in 1907 he wrote, "Oh! The miles of unwashed crockery…and unswept floors. I must learn cooking. The points I most want to learn are (a) how to cook a dozen things at once in such a manner that they don't boil over or burn at once as you are looking for the tablecloth, (b) how to persuade potatoes to be just a little quicker, (c) how to persuade toast not to be so quick!" On another occasion, after an "unforgettable lunch and motor trip"with Thomas Hardy, he wrote to a friend, Austin Lidbury, "Do you like improbable true stories? Here is one. Hardy knows my Planets because he heard them on a gramophone belonging to T. E. Lawrence who was in camp on Egdon Heath in the Tank Corps!" Sadly, Holst's eclectic and often mystical late compositions fell out of favour with both public and the musical establishment. Gloriously, the popularity of the Planets endures. The music speaks for itself - from the menacing five beats of Mars to the celestial five beats of Neptune, we love every note. One can imagine how Holst would suffer at the indignity of having his wonderful Jupiter melody trivialised for the Rugby World Cup last year!