The Planets

Background

The concept of the work is astrological rather than astronomical (which is why Earth is not included): each movement is intended to convey ideas and emotions associated with the influence of the planets on the psyche, not the Roman deities. The idea of the work was suggested to Holst by Clifford Bax, who introduced him to astrology when the two were part of a small group of English artists holidaying in Majorca in the spring of 1913; Holst became quite a devotee of the subject, and would cast his friends' horoscopes for fun. Holst also used Alan Leo's book What is a Horoscope? as a springboard for his own ideas, as well as for the subtitles (e.g., "The Bringer of...") for the movements.

When composing The Planets Holst initially scored the work for piano duet, except for Neptune, which was scored for a single organ, as Holst believed that the sound of the piano was too percussive for a world as mysterious and distant as Neptune. Holst then scored the suite for a large orchestra, in which form it became enormously popular. Holst's use of orchestration was very imaginative and colourful, showing the influence of such contemporary composers as Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as such late Russian romantics as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov. Its novel sonorities helped make the work an immediate success with audiences at home and abroad. Although The Planets remains Holst's most popular work, the composer himself did not count it among his best creations and later in life complained that its popularity had completely surpassed his other works. He was, however, partial to his own favourite movement, Saturn.

Premieres

The orchestral premiere of The Planets suite, conducted at Holst's request by Adrian Boult, was held at short notice on 29 September 1918, during the last weeks of World War I, in the Queen's Hall with the financial support of Holst's friend and fellow composer H. Balfour Gardiner. It was hastily rehearsed; the musicians of the Queen's Hall Orchestra first saw the complicated music only two hours before the performance, and the choir for Neptune was recruited from pupils from St Paul's Girls' School (where Holst taught). It was a comparatively intimate affair, attended by around 250 invited associates, but Holst regarded it as the public premiere, inscribing Boult's copy of the score, "This copy is the property of Adrian Boult who first caused the Planets to shine in public and thereby earned the gratitude of Gustav Holst."

A public concert was given in London under the auspices of the Royal Philharmonic Society on 27 February 1919, conducted by Boult. Five of the seven movements were played in the order Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, and Jupiter. It was Boult's decision not to play all seven movements at this concert. He felt that when the public were being given a totally new language like that, "half an hour of it was as much as they could take in". The anonymous critic in Hazell's Annual called it "an extraordinarily complex and clever suite". At a Queen's Hall symphony concert on 22 November of that year, Holst conducted Venus, Mercury and Jupiter (this was the first public performance of Venus). There was another incomplete public performance, in Birmingham, on 10 October 1920, with five movements (Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter). It is not clear whether this performance was conducted by Appleby Matthews or the composer.

His daughter Imogen recalled, "He hated incomplete performances of The Planets, though on several occasions he had to agree to conduct three or four movements at Queen's Hall concerts. He particularly disliked having to finish with Jupiter, to make a 'happy ending', for, as he himself said, 'in the real world the end is not happy at all'".

The first complete performance of the suite at a public concert did not occur until 15 November 1920; the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) was conducted by Albert Coates. This was the first time the movement Neptune had been heard in a public performance, all the other movements having been given earlier public airings.

The composer conducted a complete performance for the first time on 13 October 1923, with the Queen's Hall Orchestra at a Promenade Concert. Holst conducted the LSO in two recorded performances of The Planets: the first was an acoustic recording made in sessions between 1922 and 1924 (now available on Pavilion Records' Pearl label); the second was made in 1926, and utilised the then-new electrical recording process (in 2003, this was released on compact disc by IMP and later on Naxos outside the United States). Because of the time constraints of the 78rpm format, the tempi are often much faster than is usually the case today.

Instrumentation

The work is scored for a large orchestra consisting of four flutes (third doubling first piccolo and fourth doubling second piccolo and "bass flute in G", actually an alto flute), three oboes (third doubling bass oboe), one English horn, three clarinets in B♭ and A, one bass clarinet in B♭, three bassoons, one contrabassoon; six horns in F, four trumpets in C, two trombones, one bass trombone, one tenor tuba in B♭ (actually a euphonium scored for treble clef), one bass tuba; a percussion section with six timpani (requiring two players), bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, triangle, tam-tam, tambourine, glockenspiel, xylophone, tubular bells; celesta, pipe organ; 2 harps and strings. In Neptune, two three-part women's choruses (each comprising two sopranos and one alto) located in an adjoining room which is to be screened from the audience are added.

Structure

The suite has seven movements, each named after a planet and its corresponding astrological character (see Planets in astrology):

1. Mars, the Bringer of War (1914)
2. Venus, the Bringer of Peace (1914)
3. Mercury, the Winged Messenger (1916)
4. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity (1914)
5. Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age (1915)
6. Uranus, the Magician (1915)
7. Neptune, the Mystic (1915)

Holst's original title, as seen on the handwritten full score, was "Seven Pieces for Large Orchestra". Holst almost certainly attended an early performance of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra in 1914 (the year he wrote Mars, Venus and Jupiter), and owned a score of it, the only Schoenberg score he ever owned. Each movement of Holst's work was originally called only by the second part of each title (I "The Bringer of War", II "The Bringer of Peace" and so on); the present titles were added in time for the first (incomplete) public performance in September 1918, though they were never added to the original score.

A typical performance of all seven movements is about fifty minutes long, though Holst's own electric recording from 1926 is just over forty-two and a half minutes.

One explanation for the suite's structure, presented by Holst scholar Raymond Head, is the ruling of astrological signs of the zodiac by the planets: if the signs are listed along with their ruling planets in the traditional order starting with Aries, ignoring duplication and the luminaries (the Sun and Moon), the order of the movements corresponds. Critic David Hurwitz offers an alternative explanation for the piece's structure: that Jupiter is the centrepoint of the suite and that the movements on either side are in mirror images. Thus Mars involves motion and Neptune is static; Venus is sublime while Uranus is vulgar, and Mercury is light and scherzando while Saturn is heavy and plodding. This hypothesis is lent credence by the fact that the two outer movements, Mars and Neptune, are both written in rather unusual quintuple meter.

Holst suffered neuritis in his right arm, which caused him to seek help from several amanuenses in scoring The Planets. This is clear from the number of different hands apparent in the full score.

Neptune was one of the first pieces of orchestral music to have a fade-out ending, although several composers (including Joseph Haydn in the finale of his Farewell Symphony) had achieved a similar effect by different means. Holst stipulates that the women's choruses are "to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed", and that the final bar (scored for choruses alone) is "to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance". Although commonplace today, the effect bewitched audiences in the era before widespread recorded sound—after the initial 1918 run-through, Holst's daughter Imogen (in addition to watching the charwomen dancing in the aisles during Jupiter) remarked that the ending was "unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women's voices growing fainter and fainter... until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence".

Additions by other composers

Several attempts have been made, for a variety of reasons, to append further music to Holst's suite, though by far the most common presentation of the music in the concert hall and on record remains Holst's original seven-movement version.

Pluto

Pluto was discovered in 1930, four years before Holst's death, and was hailed by astronomers as the ninth planet. Holst, however, expressed no interest in writing a movement for the new planet. He had become disillusioned by the popularity of the suite, believing that it took too much attention away from his other works.

In the March 1972 final broadcast of his Young People's Concerts series, conductor Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic through a fairly straight interpretation of the suite, though Bernstein discarded the Saturn movement because he thought the theme of old age was irrelevant to a concert for children. The broadcast concluded with an improvised performance he called "Pluto, the Unpredictable". The 26 March 1972 performance may be viewed on the Kultur DVD set.

In 2000, the Hallé Orchestra commissioned the English composer Colin Matthews, an authority on Holst, to write a new eighth movement, which he called "Pluto, the Renewer". Dedicated to the late Imogen Holst, Gustav Holst's daughter, it was first performed in Manchester on 11 May 2000, with Kent Nagano conducting the Hallé Orchestra. Matthews also changed the ending of Neptune slightly so that movement would lead directly into Pluto.

On 24 August 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) defined what it means to be a "planet" within the Solar System. This definition excluded Pluto as a planet and added it as a member of the new category "dwarf planet", along with Eris and Ceres.

Following the IAU decision, Kenyon D. Wilson composed a trombone quintet piece titled "Songs of Distant Earth". The title comes from Arthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name. The composition contains five movements, each named after one of the five known dwarf planets, Eris, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Ceres.

Asteroids

In 2006, the Berlin Philharmonic, with Sir Simon Rattle and EMI Classics, commissioned four composers (Kaija Saariaho, Matthias Pintscher, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and Brett Dean) and recorded an additional, four-movement suite based on asteroids in the Solar System. The four movements were:

1. Asteroid 4179: Toutatis (Saariaho)
2. Towards Osiris (Pintscher)
3. Ceres (Turnage)
4. Komarov's Fall (Dean)

Non-orchestral arrangements

In popular culture

Hymns

Holst adapted the melody of the central section of Jupiter in 1921 to fit the metre of a poem beginning "I Vow to Thee, My Country". As a hymn tune it has the title Thaxted, after the town in Essex where Holst lived for many years, and it has also been used for other hymns, such as "O God beyond all praising". It is by far the best-known melody of the suite.

"I Vow to Thee, My Country" was written between 1908 and 1918 by Sir Cecil Spring Rice and became known as a response to the human cost of World War I. The hymn was first performed in 1925 and quickly became a patriotic anthem. Although Holst had no such patriotic intentions when he originally composed the music, these adaptations have encouraged others to draw upon the score in similar ways throughout the 20th Century.

The melody was also adapted and set to lyrics by Charlie Skarbek and titled 'World In Union'. The song is used as the theme song for the Rugby World Cup and appears in most television coverage and before matches.