Who’d have thought a lads’ holiday in Mallorca
would inspire one of the greatest pieces of music?!
In 1913, 39-year-old Gustav Holst was living it up
in Spain with composer buddies Arnold Bax and Balfour Gardiner.
If you’ve never heard them,
well... ...that’s fairs!
Compared with what was going on in Europe at the turn of the 20th century,
in ENGLAND, classical music was pretty lame.
Also pretty lame was Clifford Bax, Arnold’s poet brother, who’d joined them on holiday.
No-one WANTED Cliff there.
Literally, no-one wanted Clifford!
And it wasn’t just because he was the only non-composer of the bunch.
“Balfour! Read this book! It’s well cool!”
“Erm, mate, can’t you see?"
"... I’m try ‘na catch the rays?”
“Yo bro! This book, like..."
"...BLEW MY MIND!”
“Erm, this is a HOLIDAY,"
"and when one is on holiday,
one does not want to be be disturbed by you and your oddball fads, Clifford."
“Holst!"
"Ma main man...!"
"YOU are the guy who has to read this!!!”
“Aha?"
"Try me...”
“Well...it was written by this witch called Alan Leo"
"and it’s all about ASTROLOGY!”
"Astrology...!"
"Who has time for this, Clifford?!"
"Seriously...get a life.”
And that’s when Holst got hooked on astrology.
Because he soon realised that Alan Leo’s book wasn’t all about vague fortune-telling.
Instead, it turned astrology into a sort of systematic science.
It examined the psychological attributes of the planets that rule over the signs of the zodiac.
So inspired was Holst that he decided to create a suite of musical pieces,
each movement based on the emotional vibes of each planet.
He got down to writing the suite in 1914.
Every weekend he was composing it in the new soundproofed room at St Paul’s Girls' School,
where he was the music teacher.
It is written in seven movements.
The first is Mars, bringer of war.
It starts menacingly quiet.
The sound texture is craggy because Holst instructs the string players to hit
their instruments with the wooden backs of their bows.
A relentless percussive beat underscores the music
like a march into war.
Which in some senses it was
since Holst wrote Mars on the outbreak of World War One.
All the brutality and violence of this movement is like a premonition of that bloody conflict.
The almighty orchestra is ferociously loud and strikes dissonant chords in a manner inspired by Igor Stravinsky.
Stravinsky's ground breaking ballet, the Rite of Spring, had premiered only a year before Holst starting writing his suite.
Listen carefully and you will feel that this movement has a
jagged pulse which comes from the unusual rhythm.
It’s written in quintuple time, meaning five beats per bar,
which sounds unnatural to us but was typical of
the unconventional time meters used in Eastern music that captivated Holst.
After the disorder of Mars has passed, Venus arrives as the restorer of harmony.
Venus is dominated by soft flutes and the harp,
an instrument associated with peace and feminine beauty.
The strings shimmer across cool, calm and colourful chords.
A haunting solo violin suggest the tranquillity of Venus herself,
the Roman goddess of love, in heavenly repose.
Our journey continues with Mercury, the Roman messenger god.
Mercury’s winged sandals and cap could bring out the deliveries as fast as Amazon Prime.
So this movement is structured as a fleeting scherzo.
It’s the shortest and fastest movement of the entire suite.
Folky themes hop and skip nervously between harp, flute and glockenspiel.
Flighty and unpredictable. You might even say MERCURIAL.
Yeah, look it up, nerds, the word derives from Mercury!
The same can’t be said for Jupiter.
As the Roman king of the gods and the most massive of our solar system’s planets,
Holst had to pull out all the stops for this one.
Astrologically, Jupiter symbolises grandeur, extroversion and good fortune.
To Holst, he was everyone’s round-faced jolly fat naughty great-uncle.
Hey ho!
Hear those waltzing strings and juicy brass play!
It’s quintessentially English.
Think children merrily maypole dancing in some quaint English village.
This twee quality reflects Holst’s lifelong passion for English folk music.
Holst dials the Englishness to 11 with Jupiter’s middle section.
The majestic melody was set to words a few years later
to form the patriotic hymn
“I Vow to Thee My Country”.
An unabashed celebration of life and hope,
it's remained a famous anthem ever since,
sung throughout school assembly halls and before national sporting events.
Sadly, Jupiter’s festivities are not to last.
It’s time to sober up for Saturn, bringer of old age, decay and
DEATH.
Flutes and harps oscillate slowly between dissonant
chords and there's almost no musical progression.
It’s heavy. It's unsettling.
The tolling of bells signals the start of a ghostly funeral march.
It reminds us of unremitting time,
of the inevitability of life receding from our mortal bodies.
Here, Holst was clearly inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s avant-garde music.
He studied the way the Austrian composer used
unusual harmonies to create highly expressionistic moods.
In Saturn’s finale, we reach a point of serenity
as though we’ve come to terms with accepting our mortal fate.
And so begins Uranus, heralded by an ominous brass fanfare.
Holst was INSANELY talented at composing for brass,
probably because he himself was a trombonist.
He also looked to his hero Wagner,
who certainly knew how to get the most out of trombones, trumpets, horns and tubas.
Like the German composer, Holst included in The Planets many unconventional instruments
like the tenor tuba, like the bass oboe
to create innovative soundscapes.
These were perfect for capturing the eccentricities of Uranus,
who in astrology signifies magic and invention.
And what better inspiration for this movement than The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
It was composed twenty years earlier by Paul Dukas
and immortalised by Mickey Mouse in Disney's Fantasia.
Uranus has all the same comic bumbling.
We gallop through some erratic tunes and boisterous dances
before hearing a massive tutti chord –
that is, the full might of the orchestra playing one note together.
This deflates into silence, as though the magician Uranus
has suddenly vanished into a whiff of smoke...
...which leads us onto the mysteries of Neptune.
The one planet invisible to the naked eye,
it’s unsurprising that psychics revere Neptune for its powers to discern the unknowable.
Shimmering harps and slippery strings capture its far-off remote beauty.
They sway slowly between uncertain chords
and they’re underpinned by a lyrical celeste:
a kooky-sounding keyboard instrument.
Tuneless, shapeless, abstract, static:
to early audiences, Holst’s music would have defied logic.
A female choir enters singing wordless ums and ahs.
They’re like mystical sirens transporting us into outer space.
It was an effect Claude Debussy had used some
years earlier to create an otherworldly atmosphere.
Holst takes this further,
placing the choir in an adjoining room so that they’re invisible to the audience.
As we reach the end of Neptune, the finale of The Planets, the orchestra drops out.
We're left with the choir repeating a series of puzzling unresolved chords.
Holst stipulated that, at this point, the door to the choir room was to be
closed very slowly until the sound of the choir was lost in the distance.
This makes it one of the first pieces of orchestral music to have a fade-out ending.
The mystical voices dissolve into the infinity of the cosmos.
Holst completed The Planets in 1916, two years after starting it.
Sadly, it went straight onto the backburner.
No way could he assemble the enormous orchestra and choir during wartime austerity.
Two years after THAT, in the final weeks of the war,
Holst announced he was taking up an overseas job offer.
At this point, Balfour Gardiner, one of those Spanish holiday lads,
steps in to offer the most spectacular farewell gift.
He bankrolls the first performance of this masterpiece,
allowing Holst to use the nation's finest orchestra and London’s finest concert hall.
A burst of activity ensues to get everything ready on time.
Holst recruits his pupils to copy out the densely intricate orchestral parts.
Preparations were so tight that the orchestra only saw
the music just two hours before the performance.
But this premiere was a private event in September 1918 for some 250 musos.
It was not for ANOTHER two years that the general public would hear the full piece.
Until then, The Planets was shortened.
Conductors deemed it simply too radical,
too avant-garde for the public to endure in its full length.
Holst was never happy about this.
Why?
Because the suite is structured carefully to suggest
the harmonious balance of the solar system.
Just hear me out.
If we take Jupiter as the centrepoint of the piece,
the movements each side of it become mirror images of each other.
Mars, the first movement, involves motion,
whereas Neptune, the last, is static.
Venus is sublime whereas Uranus is vulgar.
Mercury is light whereas Saturn is heavy.
Some even think that the ordering of the planets parallels the ages of humankind –
that it’s a progression from youthful brutality in Mars to old-aged stoicism in Neptune.
Holst’s Planets has now become something of a pop cultural phenomenon.
During the hippie era of space exploration,
its far-out sounds were imitated and emulated by psychedelic bands.
Prog-rockers then adapted it, from King Crimson to Emerson, Lake and Powell.
But its greatest impact is on film composers.
Look no further than John Williams’ soundtrack for the Star Wars films.
In Darth Vader’s Imperial March, there’s more than a passing resemblance to Holst’s opening movement, Mars.
So there we have it: The Planets by Gustav Holst.
But...wait a second...
...aren’t we missing something?
Where ARE you Pluto?!
Well, Pluto wasn’t discovered until a decade after Holst completed the Planets.
And when it WAS, the composer refused to write another movement.
You see, Holst was a shy man who shunned the limelight.
Jaded by his one-hit wonder status, he wanted nothing more to do with the
bloomin’ piece that only EVERYONE talked about.
But it didn’t matter in the end.
Because in 2006, the space boffins stripped Pluto of its planetary status.
So it seems that Holst had things right all along...
and he didn’t need to cast horoscopes or read palms to predict THAT!