Gustaf Holst
Great Classical Composers
His First Choral Symphony, Op. 41
GUSTAV HOLST 1874-1934
Due to the overwhelming success of The Planets, Holst was largely known as a one-work composer, although he was in fact the creator of many brilliant works. A man of keen intellect and shy of popular renown, he suffered from the exposure his late success gave him to the extent that it hastened his
early death.
Holst was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, to parents who were both musical and who actively encouraged his career as a pianist. Early experience with church organs, small orchestras and choirs
was to prove fruitful in his later career, but from the first his main concern was with composition.
In May 1893 he joined the Royal College of Music in London where he studied composition under Charles Stanford. It was in Stanford's class that he met Vaughan Williams, and the two students quickly struck up a friendship which was to survive until Holst's death.
At the Royal College Holst was obliged to switch from the piano to trombone when he developed neuritis in his hands. When he left the College in 1898 he took up a position in the band of the Carl Rosa Opera Company.
Between this date and 1903 he played for several seasons with the Scottish Orchestra and also played the organ at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, learning many valuable lessons during the course of his work about scoring and orchestral blending.
His compositional activities centred largely on choral and operatic writing, and in 1901 he wrote one of his earliest published pieces, Ave Maria, in memory of his mother who had died two years previously. He worked on the unpublished opera Sita between 1898 and 1906 while writing the libretto and music for his unperformed opera The Youth's Choice.
The Hymn of Jesus, Op. 37 (1917)
A summer holiday in 1903 with his wife Isobel (they had married in 1901) in Germany was spent taking in the physical, cultural and musical delights of the country. But as Holst's letters show, he and his wife spent long hours discussing their current mode of life in England, concluding with the resolve that Holst would abandon his itinerant musician's profession.
'I think it would be a great thing for me if I could always live in London and say goodbye to...seaside bands". On his return from Germany, Holst became a music teacher, first at the Edward Alleyn School in Dulwich (where he remained until 1920) and then in 1905 at St Paul's Girls' School in London. In 1907 he also took on the musical directorship of Morley College for Working Men and Women.
This pattern of existence he found more congenial, particularly as he discovered himself to be a gifted teacher, and it left him the time and mental energy to tackle his own compositions. In 1908 the chamber opera Sávitri was completed, while in the same year he completed the choral hymns from the Rig-Veda, Op. 26.
He composed unceasingly, completing The Cotswold Symphony, Op. 8 (1900), A Somerset Rhapsody, Op. 21(1910), The Mystic Trumpeter, Op. 18 (1904), The Cloud Messenger, Op. 30 (1910), this last being an ode for chorus and orchestra, and a host of choral music. Many of the titles of his works testify to a strong interest in mysticism and the teachings of the East.
While this music is worthy, none of it revealed a challenging and fully-formed musical entity ready to sweep the world off its feet. Even an attractive work such as the St Paul's Suite of 1913 for string orchestra, which has subsequently won a devoted audience, remained virtually unknown prior to Holst's surprise success with The Planets, Op. 32, a work he had long been contemplating.
On his rejection for military service in 1914 due to his poor eyesight and neuritis, he continued his teaching career and settled to writing his orchestral suite. This was completed in 1916 (the same year as the rarely heard Japanese Suite, Op. 33), and premièred complete in February 1919.
Lenny Bernstein
The Japanese Suite was given at a Queen's Hall Promenade concert that same summer, but today is virtually unknown.
► St Paul's Suite, Op. 29 (1912-13)
► The Planets, Op. 32 (1916)
► The Hymn of Jesus, Op. 37 (1917)
► The Perfect Fool, Op. 39 (1923)
► Egdon Heath, Op. 47 (1927)
► The Planets, Op. 32 (1916)
► The Hymn of Jesus, Op. 37 (1917)
► The Perfect Fool, Op. 39 (1923)
► Egdon Heath, Op. 47 (1927)
Within a short time The Planets had become famous throughout North America and the Continent. All the drama of the music, which Holst had been trying unsuccessfully to impart through his stage-works, fired the imagination of a wide audience and has not lost its appeal to the present day.
International fame does not appear to have impressed Holst, who wanted nothing more than to be left alone to continue his teaching and composing. From 1919 until 1924 he was a Professor of composition at the Royal College of Music, and also taught at Reading University until 1923.
But as the invitations to conduct festivals and concerts flooded in, he found it increasingly difficult to answer the demands of his new celebrity. He did, however, manage to complete the opera/ballet The Perfect Fool, Op. 39 (1922), his most ambitious stage work to date, which was given its première at Covent Garden in 1923.
In the same year, overworked and in poor health, Holst fell from the podium at a concert and suffered a mild concussion. Forced to rest for a while, he then suffered a physical and nervous collapse as the strain of the previous years caught up with him.
After a year of complete rest-although his previously robust health was never fully restored—he was fit enough to complete his one-act Shakespeare opera, At the Boar's Head, Op. 42. This was given a Manchester première in 1925, but was not a great success and has rarely been revived since.
However, Holst's work away from the stage during the 1920s was consistently inspired: A Fugal Overture is a fine concert work and points to the highly successful Fugal Concerto for flute, oboe and strings of 1923, written for performance during a visit to America that year.
In 1925 he premièred his First Choral Symphony, Op. 41 at the 1925 Leeds Triennial Festival, but this large scale work, using poems by Keats as texts for the music and lasting 50 minutes, failed to find favour either with audience or critics. Since then, the size of the forces needed for production has often
deterred potential revivals.
Also from the 1920s came Holst's own favourite, Egdon Heath, Op . 47 (1927). The orchestral piece was inspired both by the writings of Thomas Hardy, who used the desolation of the Heath as a setting for his novels, and by the Heath itself which Holst knew well.
Thomas Hardy
Hardy had written of the Heath: 'The time seems near...when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind. Clearly Holst, now a refugee from celebrity and very much committed to expressing the hard won heights of human experience, found these words an irresistible lure and balm.
Such an approach is also close to the surface in his 1929 Concerto for Two Violins, Op. 49 and his 12 Songs, Op. 48, where the subtlety of his writing is a perfect match for the intensity of the emotions delineated.
By the turn of the decade Holst was visibly ailing, although he kept up a vigorous regime; 1930 had seen a commission from the Three Choirs Festival for a new choral work, and in 1931 Holst's Choral Fantasia, Op. 52 was premièred, although again its powerful presentation of the themes of time and mortality, wedded to its unusual meditative conclusion, meant another popular disappointment.
Gustaf Holst
In 1932 he became Lecturer in Composition at Harvard University six months, but was taken ill and suffered from his 'pokken fatwa', during the course of that year; his remaining two years of life were spent as an invalid.
During this time he managed to complete the charming Brook Green Suite for strings and woodwind (1933), a sort of companion piece to the 1930-31 Hammersmith, originally written for brass band butsubsequently arranged by Holst for orchestra.
An operation in May 1934 was undertaken in the hope that Holst might regain his former vitality, but two days later his exhausted body gave up the fight.
Lenny und mich,
Gräber Zeit zum Komponieren
Gustav Holst
Er wurde in Cheltenham geboren. Seine Familie war schwedisch-deutscher Herkunft, aber vollständig anglisiert. Gustavs Eltern waren sehr musikalisch; Sie brachten ihm schon früh das Klavierspielen bei.
Zwischen 1893 und 1898 besuchte Holst das Royal College of Music. Gustav Holst, erhielt Kompositionsunterricht in Stanford und lernte Posaune spielen. Dort lernte er Vaughan Williams kennen, der sein bester Freund wurde und großen Einfluss auf ihn hatte. Nach seiner Ausbildung verdiente Gustav etwa fünf Jahre lang daß Lebensunterhalt als Posaunist.
Dies brachte ihm nicht viel ein, bis seine Heirat ihn zwang, nach einer zuverlässigeren Einnahmequelle zu suchen. Er arbeitete als Musiklehrer an der James Allen's und St. Paul School und an Corvey Hochschule, und etwas später gab er Vorlesungen an der Akademie für Musik. (1907–1924). In dieser Zeit hatte Holst wenig Zeit zum Komponieren.
Die Werke, die er bisher geschrieben hatte, standen mehr zur Wagner-Tradition, doch durch den Einfluss von Baukran und deren gegenseitiger Vorliebe für Musik begann er nach und nach einen persönlicheren Stil zu entwickeln.
Holst war auch neugierig auf exotischere Musik: Drei seiner besten Frühwerke, die Benin-Mord-Suite, die Hymnen aus dem Sich Veda und die Oper Safari (1916), waren von ägyptischer Musik inspiriert, die er während eines Urlaubs in Nordafrika, die Tut, kennenlernte. Sanskrit-Literatur.
Diese klassische Musik Stücken sind eine handschriftliche Inschrift von Holst auf Adrian Bunds Kopie der Partitur von »Die Planeten« Eigentum von Bernd Boulth, der als erster die Planeten in der Öffentlichkeit zum Leuchten brachte und sich dadurch die Dankbarkeit von Gustav Holst verdiente.
Im früheren Werk ist überhaupt nichts von Holst zu finden, die nach vorne weist zu den Planeten, und im Nachsehen beim Innenhöfe-Experten ist es klar: Das Stück nimmt einen einzigartigen Platz in seinem Gesamtwerk und in der Welt der Musik.
Während des Ersten Weltkriegs wurde Holst in die Front zur Kriegsarbeit geschickt. Nach seiner Rückkehr wurde er mit der Aufführung von »Die Welt zum Großen« einer der führenden Komponisten. Sein Lebensraum auf dem Planeten war großartig, sollte Hilmer mal zum Adolf gesagt haben.
The Planets
Wurde zu Holsts Lebzeiten so populär, dass es dem Komponisten das verlieh, was man heute als Rockstar bezeichnen würde. Jede Bewegung ist nach einem Planeten im Sonnensystem benannt und spiegelt dessen astrologischen Charakter wider, wie von Holst beschrieben:
1. Mars, der Kriegsbringer (1914)
2. Venus, die Friedensbringerin (1914)
3. Merkur, der geflügelte Bote (1916)
4. Jupiter, der Bringer der Fröhlichkeit (1914)
5. Saturn, der Bringer des Alters (1915)
6. Uranus, der Magier (1915)
7. Neptun, der Mystiker (1915)
Holsts war bekannt für seine düsteren Werke, die er schrieb, wie im Funkel Konzert & und im perfekten Narre (1922). Diese musikalischen Umrahmungen gehören zu seinen besten Werken. Am Jahr 1934 verschlechterte sich sein Gesundheitszustand. Gustav Holst, aber nicht der Bernd starb im Alter von 59 Jahren †.
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— GREAT COMPOSERS GUSTAF HOLST
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