Gustav Holst: From Folk Tunes to Film Music
Homage to the influential British composer
Gustav Holst (1874–1934) was a British composer, conductor, teacher, translator, and (what we would now call) ethnomusicologist, whose reputation rests almost entirely on one work — The Planets Suite for Orchestra (op. 32).
It’s unfortunate that his other work is not appreciated more — but to have one’s reputation defined by such an extraordinary achievement as The Planets is hardly unfortunate. It is one of the most popular and regularly performed pieces in the repertoire, featured every year at the Proms. It has always been in the top twenty of Classic FM’s Chart, an annual vote, and this year it ascended to the top ten, alongside Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. It has been influential on film music. It’s also my personal favourite piece.
Yet, scarcely another note of Holst’s work besides The Planets is heard in concert halls or over the airwaves. Considering that his output includes symphonies, songs, hymns, suites, opera, ballet, choral works, rhapsodies, and tone poems… this is very disappointing. His friend, the more famous Ralph Vaughn Williams (RVW), is performed more often. Although RVW is a fine composer, I would argue that Holst’s work is more interesting.
Firstly, I should clarify that I don’t mean to compare them. It’s a matter of debate as to whom influenced whom the most, but to my ear, Holst has a more powerful musical voice. RVW wrote some of the most beautiful and popular British music (The Lark Ascending has often been voted number 1 on the Classic FM Chart). Nevertheless, his music sounds less confident (for want of a more precise word). RVW studied under the French composer Ravel, and as such, he gained a more French, ‘impressionist’ style (At least that’s how I describe it), whereas Holst was always more late-Romantic/Germanic. And this is partly why Holst’s music can be described as ‘cinematic’.
I consider opera as the cinema of the 19th century— the grandest and most expensive art form. And by the end of the 19th century, when Holst was studying at the Royal College of Music in London, opera was dominated by Wagner, the German composer of ‘music dramas’, including The Ring Cycle and Tannhauser. Holst was captivated. Once, after attending a performance of Tristan und Isolde (I think), he wandered aimlessly though London in a daze. Now that is the intoxicating power of Wagner — and that powerful and mysterious quality seeped into Holst’s work.
Wagner’s use of leitmotifs — a small piece of music that represents a character/idea/object — carries over into film music. Korngold’s score for The Adventures of Robin Hood and Steiner’s score for Gone With the Wind are full of leitmotifs, for example. To my ear, there’s also something about the orchestration — Wagner uses all the colours that the orchestra can conjure. (I should say he’s also one of my favourite composers!) Although he is known as a very loud composer, his final opera Parsifal shows that he can write subtle, aethereal music, too. Holst was influenced by all of this, and he took the ‘cinematic’ quality of Wagner and made it his own. How? In the least cinematic and most British way possible…
Folk Music
Holst and RVW wanted to revive British music. They were aware that since the good old days of Purcell and Tallis, there had been two centuries of silence. So Holst and RVW (re)turned to the folk tradition (I think now we’d call this ethnomusicology — researching the origins of the music). Just as Bartok and Kodaly were rambling around the countryside of Hungary listening to the songs of country folk, so too did the Englishmen. It’s interesting to note that these two pairs were motivated in the same way at a similar time. Perhaps they could sense the upcoming upheaval of the 20th century and knew that it would be necessary to return to their roots, while everything else was in flux. (There were other similarities: Kodaly and Holst were both teachers; Bartok and Holst were introverts who wrote extroverted music; RVW and Kodaly wrote fine, but less adventurous music…)
Some American critic (whose name I can’t remember, alas) very unfairly called the music of RVW and Holst, “cowpat music.” Yet, I do not hear insults being thrown at Bartok and Kodaly, who were doing the same thing. Is one folk tradition more admirable than another? This mentality is unfair and needs to be corrected. British composers still struggle to be fully appreciated. Maybe because the English pastoral is too ‘quaint.’ Or it’s probably to do with dear old Gilbert and Sullivan…
In Holst’s most English music, there is not a cowpat in sight. Even in the ‘Cotswolds’ Symphony, there is not a deary or farcical note. The Somerset Rhapsody is passionate and colourful, and on Egdon Heath, of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Return of the Native, there is a slow, Wagnerian building of atmosphere.
Holst took Wagner’s grand operatic style and brought it back down to earth. It could be said that he made it more ‘accessible,’ just as film music is now considered more ‘accessible’ than works written for the concert hall. As much as I love Wagner’s operas, it is hard work to concentrate for five hours on this heavy music, with complicated stories and characters. By contrast, Holst, rather than flying around with dragons, gods, rainbows, etc., chose to paint musical pictures of places that we know; real places and real people.
Yet, in many ways, he was an outsider. Some of this was unavoidable. I believe he had Swedish ancestry and his name was ‘von Holst’, but this became inconvenient during the First World War (on one of his rambles, he was suspected of being a spy!), so he dropped the too German-sounding ‘von’. He suffered with poor health throughout his life, and an issue with the nerves in his right hand meant he had to conduct with his left; I consider this quite symbolic. His outsider reputation was mostly deliberate. When he achieved fame with the success of The Planets, he hated it, and whenever he was asked for an autograph, he would give his fans a typed piece of paper saying that he didn’t give autographs. This is probably why he is less well known today, because he didn’t want any attention at the time.
Minimalism
Holst was ahead of his time. One of the best examples of this is a fairly early work (1910), probably his most ‘cinematic’ piece besides The Planets. It is called Beni Mora, inspired by his visit to Algeria (he was advised to go for his health). It’s a short piece, but grand and sweeping. There’s some mysterious element of tragedy in it. In the Proms performance below of the third movement (‘In the Street of the Ouled Nails’), the conductor, Sascha Goetzel, pauses at the end — we need time to let the desert dust settle after this powerful whirlwind. It definitely tells a story.
You can imagine Lawrence of Arabia appearing over the sand dunes and, personally, I prefer it to the theme music to the film (although of course they were trying to achieve different aims). Perhaps it is useful to listen to them side by side to hear the similarities and differences:
In the third movement is the earliest example of Minimalism that I am aware of. The same tune on the flute is repeated from beginning to end. Composers such as Philip Glass (a film composer) would become known as ‘Minimalists’, but Holst had beaten them to it.
I appreciate Minimalism very much, and most of the pieces I play on piano are scores for film and TV. Max Richter’s Taboo is for the TV series of that name, Glass’ Dead Things (The Hours), Truman Sleeps (The Truman Show), It Was Always You, Helen (Candyman)… There is a lot of Minimalism in modern soundtracks, so this shows how inventive Holst was. He would have been a fine film composer — rumour has it that he did write a film score, but it has been lost! RVW wrote the scores for Scott of the Antarctic (1948) and Powell and Pressburger’s The 49th Parallel (1941).
The ostinato in The Street of the Ouled Nails was inspired by a melody played by a Bedouin that Holst heard while in Algeria. So Holst was still listening to folk music, and treated it with just as much respect as he did the music of fellow Englishmen.
Mysticism
Film scores are generally not taken as seriously as music written for the concert hall, and this is completely wrong. Many of my favourite pieces of ‘classical’ music are film scores. And one thing often (but not always) present in film scores (which is less present in a piano concerto, for example) is a sense of ‘magic.’ For want of a better expression. (I suppose we speak of the ‘magic of the cinema’ more than the ‘magic of the concert hall.’)
So, to complement, but not to contradict, my previous comment about Holst’s down-to-earth quality — in his ‘Oriental’ music, we can hear an aethereal quality, that could be described as cinematic. I don’t particularly like choral music in general, but the Hymns of the Rig Veda are beautiful, and even inspired Billie Eilish’s song GOLDWING. It’s good to see that her reference to the Hymn to Vena has sparked some interest in Holst’s music! (And it also goes to show how inventive and well-read Eilish is.)
Holst looked East for inspiration, like his contemporary T. S. Eliot — and like John Lennon and George Harrison would decades later. I mention Eliot because he was an intellectual and Holst was very academic, too. Holst taught himself Sanskrit in order to translate the hymns and the story of The Cloud Messenger! (George would learn how to play sitar.) As we have heard, he was a sympathetic listener who could write moving music, but he was also an intellectual who wrote intelligent music, too. This creates a distinctive sound and a sense of balance. A conductor once said that the music of Holst is like returning to an old friend. He was a dedicated teacher and encouraged his daughter Imogen to continue studying music — she became a conductor in an era when not many women did.
I would summarise that Holst was a composer who had his feet on the ground and his head among the stars. Almost literally. He had an interest in Astrology and often read his friends’ horoscopes. This inspired him to write The Planets.
Every year at the Proms, the concert which has The Planets on the programme sells out. It is, as the Radio 3 presenter Georgia Mann said this year, ‘blockbuster music.’ Each planet has its own movement, starting with Mars, the Bringer of War. John Williams “borrowed” much from this when composing Star Wars.
On the 1926 recording with Holst conducting, it’s interesting to note how Holst takes it so quickly! It shows how much energy is in the piece. In Mars, there is the use of col legno (i.e. striking the wooden part of the bow on the strings), which is not an often-used technique, but it demonstrates Holst’s thoughtful orchestration. Throughout the Suite, the use of the harp and celeste is beautiful and adds that aethereal quality. The Planets shows how Holst could write loud, dramatic music (Mars, Uranus), playful and joyful music (Mercury, Jupiter), but also exquisite quiet moments (Venus, Saturn, Neptune) — and they all blend together. For example, in the middle of joyful Jupiter, the slow tune that would become ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ appears — but somehow it doesn’t seem out of place.
I would say that Saturn is my favourite, as it is so mysterious — particularly the harp solo towards the end (at around 6:40 below).
Neptune, the Mystic is beautiful, too, with the women’s choir off stage, fading away at the end… in complete contrast to bombastic Mars, which portrays the brutality of war leaving a devastated landscape — foreshadowing the First World War.
I recently went to see my first live concert (unfortunately not The Planets, though), and it was only by hearing (and seeing) the orchestra live that I fully appreciated that it is the brass and the low strings that are the driving force of the orchestra. Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony was on the programme, and I noticed that the double bass are the heart beat of that great work. Holst played trombone in orchestras and brass bands (a doctor advised him that it would help his asthma) and he writes very well for the brass, evident in all his orchestral work.
In summary, The Planets has a bit of everything, all executed perfectly.
Conclusion
There’s not much else to say, except I recommend you listen to Holst! As next year is the 150th anniversary of his birth, hopefully he will receive more attention.
It’s amusing to note that the music to so many expensive blockbuster films has been inspired by a bespectacled English schoolteacher rambling around the countryside listening to rustics. :)
Pheobe.
Also, I should note that the unfortunate lack of references is due to the fact that most of my knowledge comes from reading various articles over the years and I can’t remember where I learnt most of this stuff, and accuracy may be a bit hazy — never mind! Comments and corrections are welcome!
