Rsno:Lloyd Jones - HOLST: The Planets / The Mystic Trumpeter, Op. 18

Gustav Holst (1874-1934)The Planets • The Mystic Trumpeter • Colin Matthews: PlutoHolst’s reputation depends very largely on The Planets: few composers have achieved such success with a single work. As a result, the rest of his music has been overshadowed, and The Planets often regarded as if it came from nowhere. Yet the music fits naturally into Holst’s output, a logical development from his earlier works, and a pointer to much that he was to achieve subsequently. If the musical language of The Planets might have been predicted, it remains a work that has few antecedents. No one had written a multi-movement work on this scale before. The character studies of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition or Elgar’s Enigma Variations might point in the same direction, but their individual movements are on a much smaller scale. As ‘sound pictures’, the three movements of Debussy’s La Mer or Nocturnes, which Holst probably heard Debussy conduct in 1909, and whose women’s voices in Sirènes surely influenced Neptune, are closer in form. Holst was certainly impressed by Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces, which he heard in 1914 - the original title of The Planets was ‘Seven Pieces for Large Orchestra’ (with the names of the planets omitted). The work, however, is one of the great originals. Holst called it a ‘Suite’ and while some have gone on to call it a ‘Symphonic Suite’, this is not really an appropriate subtitle. Holst preferred to work spontaneously, without great regard for strict formal procedures. Nearly all of his music, like the individual movements of The Planets, is built from relatively short structures which are self-contained, and create their own logic. Holst’s initial ideas came from his interest in astrology, a by-product of the study of Sanskrit literature which had influenced a great deal of his earlier music. It was not an obsessive interest - Holst wrote only that astrology had ‘suggested’ the characters of the planets - but it gave him a convenient hook on which to hang the musical structure and appropriate titles for the movements, expressing a mood rather than painting a picture. In an age where we are now so familiar with remarkable images of the planets, we should not forget that they were far more mysterious and remote to Holst’s generation, and that the pictures that may come to our minds are quite different from the characteristics that Holst intended to portray. Holst conceived The Planets at least as early as 1913, and the work was completed in 1917. Although the first public performance did not take place until 1920, a private performance in 1918, and several performances of parts of the work, had already established a reputation for the music, which it was never to lose. Holst recorded the work twice, in 1922-3 and in 1926, both times with the London Symphony Orchestra. The individual movements we