Gustav Holst

Gustav Holst (born September 21, 1874, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England—died May 25, 1934, London) was an English composer and music teacher noted for the excellence of his orchestration. His music combines an international flavour based on the styles of Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, and others with a continuation of English Romanticism.

The son of a Swedish father and English mother, Holst studied at the Royal College of Music in London. His solo instrument was the trombone, and for some years after leaving the college he made his living as a trombone player in the Carl Rosa Opera Company and in various orchestras. He became music master at St. Paul’s Girls’ School in 1905 and director of music at Morley College in 1907. These were the most important of his teaching posts, and he retained both of them until the end of his life.

Holst’s pioneering methods, which entailed a rediscovery of the English vocal and choral tradition (folk song, madrigals, and church music), were influential in musical education in many English schools. Many of Holst’s smaller choral works, folk-song arrangements, and instrumental pieces (e.g., the St. Paul’s Suite for strings [1913]) reflect the musical interests he sought to promote as a teacher. In this activity he shared much common ground with Ralph Vaughan Williams, his friend and contemporary. Holst’s stubbornly independent, exploring mind had need, however, of a musical language less limited and more flexible than that offered by the English folk-song school. He found fresh creative stimuli in the new European music (e.g., the innovations of Stravinsky), whose impact Holst registered in his orchestral suite The Planets (1918); and also in Hindu literature, which gave rise to his “Sanskrit” period (1908–12), during which he composed the opera Savitri and four sets of choral hymns from the Ṛigveda. The cosmopolitanism of Holst’s style, rare in English music of his period, lends him a special historical significance. In such works as Egdon Heath for orchestra (1927), the Choral Fantasia (1930), and the Fugal Concerto for flute, oboe, and string orchestra (1923), he anticipated many trends associated with later English composers who were to turn away from the self-consciously national style bred by the folk-song revival.

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Holst’s works include the opera Sita, composed during 1899–1906; The Hymn of Jesus, for chorus and orchestra (1917); Ode to Death, for chorus and orchestra (1919); The Perfect Fool, an opera (1923); Choral Symphony (1923–24); the opera At the Boar’s Head (1925); Double Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra (1929); and Hammersmith, for orchestra (1930).