Symphonic Cinema: Holst’s The Planets

About the Work

The Planets made Gustav Holst famous, somewhat against his wishes, and it has a particular link with this orchestra: the London Symphony Orchestra gave the first complete public performance, under Albert Coates, on 15 November 1920.

The idea came from astrology, not astronomy. Around 1913 Holst became absorbed in the subject and was reading the popular astrologer Alan Leo. ‘As a rule I only study things that suggest music to me,’ he explained. ‘That’s why I worried at Sanskrit. Then recently the character of each planet suggested lots to me.’ He began with Mars in 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War, and went on to Venus and Jupiter later that year. Saturn, Uranus and Neptune followed in 1915 and Mercury, the last to be written, in 1916. Progress was slow because he was a busy schoolteacher, at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London among other places, and could compose only at weekends and in the holidays.

What he produced is a set of seven character pieces for a very large orchestra. His first title was simply Seven Pieces for Large Orchestra, probably with Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra in mind, which he had heard in London. Each movement carries the name of a planet and a subtitle giving its astrological character, and Holst maintained that the subtitles were all the guidance a listener needed. There is no programme, and the gods of classical mythology are beside the point. Nor is the order that of the solar system. Holst arranged the movements for musical effect, so that the suite travels from the physical violence of Mars to the disembodied stillness of Neptune. There is no Pluto, which had not yet been discovered.

The first performance was a private one. Holst’s friend and benefactor Balfour Gardiner paid for it, and on 29 September 1918, in the last weeks of the war, Adrian Boult conducted the Queen’s Hall Orchestra before an invited audience. The players had hardly seen the music beforehand. Partial performances followed, to Holst’s irritation: he disliked hearing the suite cut, and particularly disliked seeing Jupiter placed last to make a happy ending. After the complete performance of 1920 its success was rapid and has lasted.

These concerts present the suite complete, but in an unusual way: as the live score for LOSS, a silent film by the Dutch director Lucas van Woerkum, who sits among the players and runs the images in time with them. The film, with Emma Thompson and Greg Wise, is a meditation on grief and on what may follow death. Van Woerkum has said that his starting point was a remark he attributes to Holst’s daughter Imogen, that The Planets can be heard as a progression of the human soul.

What to Listen For

Mars, the Bringer of War. A five-beat rhythm is tapped out quietly by timpani, harps and strings played with the wood of the bow, and it hardly lets up. The music builds again and again to brutal, dissonant climaxes, with the organ adding its weight.

Venus, the Bringer of Peace. A solo horn is answered softly by flutes and oboes; later come a solo violin and the cool glitter of harps, celesta and glockenspiel. It is the answer to Mars.

Mercury, the Winged Messenger. The shortest movement and the scherzo of the set, over in about four minutes. Fragments dart between instruments in two keys at once, and in the middle a small tune, first heard on a solo violin, is passed around the orchestra a dozen times in different colours.

Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. Bustling high spirits frame the broad central melody that Holst later allowed to be sung as the hymn ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’. In the suite it moves at half the speed of the music around it, and its final cadence is left unresolved.

Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age. Holst’s own favourite. Flutes and harps tread like a slow clock, a solemn melody rises in the trombones, and the procession grows to a clangorous climax with bells before it fades into calm.

Uranus, the Magician. Four loud brass notes cast the spell. A galumphing dance for bassoons and timpani gets more and more out of hand, in the manner of Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, until it is swept away at a stroke.

Neptune, the Mystic. Quiet throughout, in a swaying five-beat metre, with flutes, harps and celesta to the fore. In Holst’s score a hidden chorus of women’s voices joins without words and recedes until it is hard to say where sound ends and silence begins. The LSO’s listing for these film performances does not name a choir.