Pouring one out for Gustav

A famous composer is getting the 150th birthday treatment in the Cotswolds. But his influence extends far beyond Britain.

Jun 27, 2024

IT TURNS OUT, SHE WAS RIGHT about going to Kharkiv. It would, in fact, not have been a good idea.

Early in the year, my partner was doing a noble job of not bludgeoning me to death with an olive loaf as I talked to her pretty much incessantly about the deceased German-American physicist Walter Elsasser, on whom I was writing a profile for Baltimore Fishbowl. Among his life's many twists and turns -- sandwich dates with Schrödinger, dodging Nazis as a Christian-raised man from a family that was formerly of the Jewish faith, winning a debate with Einstein over how the earth's magnetic field was generated, etc.,. -- was an early-career residency in Kharkiv, which was called Kharkov during his time there. Ukraine's second-largest city was a place I very much wanted to visit for some interviews, in a border region which, it turns out, was not as much of a frozen conflict as I had thought.

After she convinced me not to leave Germany for the piece, the Elsasser story ended up with less of a Ukrainian focus than I had initially expected, which was very much for the better, I believe, but the whole idea of visiting Ukraine did get us talking about plans for managing risk. Around the time the Elsasser profile was published in Baltimore, my partner and I decided that the conversation about Kharkiv might be a good nudge to have a will written up via FreeWill.com, since in one's 40s, bugaboos like heart attacks and colon cancer start to become more than abstract possibilities.

The items that were not included in my will, but which would have to be sorted out if I were to get hit by a speeding bratwurst wagon charging the wrong way down one of Berlin's many fine bikeways include:

My bicycle, should it survive the delicious collision
The treasured railway spike bottle opener my father painstakingly ground and polished for a very memorable Christmas gift a few years ago
My pile of used, ripped, smudged-up, not-very-well-remembered German grammar textbooks

and
My collection of various government organizations' rosters of forms (thought this stash is digital, open to the public and of comically niche interest, so it probably won't be too divisive)

One thing we pretty much don't have to worry about ever happening is the creation of an international festival of sorts paying homage to my massive output of orchestral works, as I've never written any.

Not so for Gustav Holst.

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THE BRITISH SPA TOWN of Cheltenham, where Holst was born, is already well into a sort of half-year-long, collective manic state in celebration of the 150th birthday of the composer teacher and trombonist, staging all types of concerts, museum exhibits and walking tours and, I imagine, driving at least one publicist to initiate chatty calls to reporters at 3 a.m. in which he talks ramblingly about the history of tuning slide adjustments and some really great penny stocks, the benefits of starting a direct-mail marketing company and the rewards of purchasing commemorative coins. (This is just an assumption.)

The actual birthday in question, on the 21st of September, will be marked by a free community event in Cheltenham's Imperial Gardens, along with a separate celebratory concert across the country in the Royal Albert Hall.

The young Gustav Holst "enjoyed practicing the piano," Holst's daughter, Imogen, wrote in a book she authored about her father, "and the small boys in the neighborhood were spellbound in admiration at the dramatic way he played the Turkish March from 'The Ruins of Athens.'"

Raised in his early years by his father, Adolph, a skilled, Hamburg-educated pianist, who was soon widowed and sought the help of his also musical sister in running the household, according to the biography, Holst grew up "miserable and scared and over-sensitive," with weak eyesight and asthma.

After his father married one of his piano students, Holst was sent to grammar school. An early attempt there at setting a poem to music left him so appalled at his own ineptitude after an early run-through on the piano that he never touched the piece again. Nonetheless, the young musician persisted, taking part in four months of counterpoint studies in Oxford at 17, which dramatically strengthened his abilities.

Failing to get scholarships he applied for, Holst worked as an organist and choirmaster in Cheltenham and nearby areas. Finally, when his operetta, Landsdowne Castle was a success, his father saw his promise and sent him to the Royal College of Music.

Switching to trombone after nerve problems intermittently prevented his hands from working properly at the piano keyboard, he hoped that playing a brass instrument would help with his breathing problems as well. In 1894, he finally won the scholarship he had sought long before, and work as a church organist, trombonist and composer followed, along with the courtship of a spouse, Isobel, who would stay with him until his death.

These early professional opportunities were not always highly stimulating jobs: At one point, Holst became so bored by a pit orchestra role that he read all the novels of Ivan Turgenev -- lent to him by Ralph Vaughan Williams -- during performances. However, as much as Holst dismissed some of his performances as a waste of time, Vaughan Williams lauded them as chances Holst received to hone his increasingly expert ear for orchestration.

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THE PIECE THAT BECAME the biggest part of Holst's legacy, The Planets, was composed between 1914 and 1917, at a time when Holst was frustrated at being rejected as unfit for military service -- a regret that was to continue until 1918, when he was allowed to do some entertainment work with British troops. (In order to gain this somewhat minor role, he found himself having to show his British loyalty by changing his last name from "von Holst" to just "Holst." He nonetheless seemed thrilled by the chance to participate, however belatedly.)

By this time, Holst had switched his main income source from playing trombone to teaching -- a role he would continue throughout the rest of his life. An ardent Socialist -- a political position that may very well have gone hand-in-hand with the appreciations of collective work that his supporting role as a trombonist had fostered -- his works included not just revivals of English folksong traditions but also folk tunes from regions as far away as Algeria, where he was sent to recover from an asthma attack in the warmer climate.

His later life saw attention -- if not smashing success -- on both sides of the Atlantic, including a brief appointment at Harvard. Holst died of heart failure after an operation on the 25th of May, 1934, in London.

The Planets was based on astrological concepts, with Mars corresponding to war, Mercury being a winged messenger, etc., but despite that mystical source, they helped revitalize an old tradition of creativity inspired by nature into high gear, nudging generations of people who made science into art. From Rachel Sussman's photography of the oldest life on earth to Luke Jerram's glass models of microbes, we benefit from the output of many, many artists who turn scientific knowledge into sculpture, visual works, music and other media. Even one of my sisters, Texan Colleen Maynard, is involved in the dance, with her collaborator, Mark Chen, projecting her extremely detailed drawings of extinct and threatened life forms on public monuments and other surfaces from the St. Louis Arch to the buildings of Dubrovnik. A lot of this large artistic group's collective body of work is heavily focused on climate change and extinction, for obvious reasons -- an examination of beauty (and sometimes comical ugliness) as a call to action at a time when the world is seeing hotter average global temperatures than at any time in recorded history and is in the middle of a mass extinction event. But even as it's a call to action, some of this work can be heart-meltingly gorgeous, inspiring not only activists, but other artists.

Conversely, it's also lovely to think of how many scientists have been inspired to continue their careers by The Planets and other science-adjacent works of art. And this process continues. As Dr. Ian Crawford of the University of London wrote in the Guardian in 2010, it's likely that "many of the children at the family matinee I went to [of The Planets in Houston, featuring projected images of space discoveries] will be inspired to look more deeply into astronomy." Most of those children are in their 20s and 30s now, and some have surely taken up the scientific baton.

Just as it's important to remember that art can rely on science, it's important to remember that science can rely on art, even after childhood has passed. Without an artistic bent, we'd lose any sense of plot in this global story we're weaving, severing interpersonal connections and becoming purely deterministic automatons, or at least an approximation thereof. The idea of hard determinism was something that even Elsasser -- the practitioner of multiple areas of hard science I profiled this year, trained as a particle physicist and self-taught in geophysics, but also thrilled by visual art, religion and free will -- rejected flatly right up through the time he wrote his memoirs in Baltimore in his 70s.

So keep your interests varied, weird, hands-on and oddly interlinked, whether that means using your art skills to represent paleobiology, reading Russian novels during your pit orchestra gig, digging up fossils, smashing atoms, playing antique instruments in a garage band or turning points of light in the sky into a choir performance. Do not try to cut your corpus callosum, tempting as it may sometimes be. Inspiration can come from strange places. Your best work may be the one you least expect to produce.

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Selected links from this piece:

» The Johns Hopkins professor who proved Einstein wrong

» Free online will creation service (still requires a notary)

» Rosters of government forms

» Holst 150 celebration events in cheltenham

» The Planets at the Royal Albert Hall in September 2024

» Colleen Maynard's drawings

» Mark Chen's photography

» Photography of the world's oldest living things

» 2023 was the hottest year in recorded history

» Models of microbes