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Holst: Works
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A Knox College graduate with graduate work at the University of Illinois, Mr. Holst was a successful salesman for ten years. He was a member of the Economic Security Committee of the United States Chamber of Commerce for two years and is active in his local chamber. He criss crosses the United States countless times each year speaking for sales, marketing, and management groups as well as conventions of all kinds.
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In the following years, Holst took advantage of new technology to publicize his work through sound recordings and the BBC’s "wireless" broadcasts. In 1927, he was commissioned by the New York Symphony Orchestra to write a symphony. He took this opportunity to work on an orchestral piece based on Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a work that would become Egdon Heath, and which would be first performed a month after Hardy’s death, in his memory. By this time, Holst was "going out of fashion", and the piece was poorly reviewed. However, Holst is said to have considered the short, subdued but powerful tone poem his greatest masterpiece. The piece has been much better received in recent years, with several recordings available.
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Holst was never one to be lazy, and he found it impossible to relax. For a while, his breakdown got worse; although it was a year since his head injury, he began to have violent pains in the back of his head; even when the pains ceased he could not bear anything touching his head - not even a hat or a pillow. Noise was a torture to him: people talking, applause, traffic. He had nightmares about making mistakes or about his creativity drying up. His doctor became alarmed and implored him to rest, advising him to give up all work for the rest of that year. Slowly he improved but he was never able to resume any regular teaching except for a very little at St Pauls where he continued to teach to the end of his life.
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A few years after the publication of the band suite, Holst was introduced to astrology by his friend Clifford Bax. A short book by Alan Leo called What is a Horoscope? suggested to Holst possibilities for musically interpreting the influences of each planet. In later years, he stressed that the suite was not intended to be programmatic, and that each movement simply suggested the traits ascribed to the planet's influence on the horoscope — the work was not intended to depict the gods and goddesses of Greco-Roman mythology.
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Shortly after his return, St Paul’s Girls School[4] opened a new music wing, and Holst composed St Paul’s Suite[4] for the occasion.[1] In 1913, Stravinsky premiered The Rite of Spring, sparking riots in Paris and caustic criticism in London. A year later, Holst first heard Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, an "ultra-modern" set of five movements employing "extreme chromaticism" (the consistent use of all 12 musical notes). Although he had earlier lampooned the stranger aspects of modern music, the new music of Stravinsky[2] and Schoenberg influenced his work on The Planets.
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A bold harmonic experimenter, Holst arrived at his fully mature style with The Planets (1914-17), a brilliantly orchestrated work in which each of seven movements corresponds to one of the planets, and the mystical choral work The Hymn of Jesus (1917). He further developed his novel harmonic idiom in his Choral Symphony (1923-24) and the symphonic poem Egdon Heath (1927), leading to polytonality in the orchestral Hammersmith (1930) and other works. The Fugal Overture (1922) and A Fugal Concerto (1923) were inspired by baroque forms. His opera subjects ranged from Hindu scripture in Savitri (1908), to Shakespeare's England in At the Boar's Head (1924), to operatic parody in The Perfect Fool (1921). His folk-song interests are seen in the orchestral Summer Rhapsody (1907) and the St. Paul's Suite (1913) for strings.
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