Holst and The Planets

There is no Earth and there is no Pluto. The reason for both omissions is the same: the piece is astrological, not astronomical, and it is not a tour of the solar system.

Holst, 1874 to 1934, was a trombonist who became a schoolteacher and wrote in the holidays. He taught at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith and at Morley College, and The Planets was composed in a soundproofed room at St Paul's. It is far and away his most played work, out of a catalogue that is otherwise almost entirely neglected, and that imbalance irritated him considerably.

Why there is no Earth and no Pluto

Astrology, not astronomy, chose the seven. Holst took his scheme from the astrological characters of the planets, in which each body governs a temperament: Mars war, Venus peace, Mercury communication, Jupiter fortune, Saturn age, Uranus disruption, Neptune the unseen. Earth has no astrological character because, in that system, Earth is where the observer stands. It is not one of the influences; it is the thing being influenced.

Pluto is simply a matter of dates. It was not discovered until 1930, thirteen years after Holst completed the suite, and he lived another four years without adding a movement. Colin Matthews wrote a Pluto movement in 2000 for the Halle Orchestra and it is occasionally appended, but the ordinary performance stops at Neptune. Pluto was in any case reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, which leaves the addition answering a question nobody now asks.

The sequence is not the order of distance from the sun, which would put Mercury first. It runs Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, an order that works as a piece of music: a violent opening, a slow movement, a light scherzo, the popular centrepiece, then a long descent into the two strangest movements and a disappearance.

The seven movements, one by one

Neptune, the offstage chorus and the fade

Neptune ends the suite with a device that had no real precedent. A wordless female chorus, singing no text at all, is placed offstage in an adjoining room with the door open, out of sight of the audience and of most of the orchestra. The orchestra thins away and leaves the voices alone, repeating a short phrase. Holst's instruction in the score is that the door be slowly and silently closed while the voices continue, so that the sound does not stop but recedes until it cannot be heard.

Three practical problems follow, and every performance has to solve them. The chorus must be kept in time with a conductor it cannot see, normally managed with an assistant conductor stationed among the singers and a video relay. The room must be genuinely adjacent, since a chorus too far away arrives late and one too close does not fade. And somebody must close the door at a speed that produces a smooth diminuendo, which is a stagehand's job and a surprisingly difficult one.

The result is that the work has no final chord. The audience is left uncertain whether the sound has stopped, which is why conductors hold their hands up for a long moment afterwards and why applause at the end of Neptune usually starts hesitantly.

Mars was written before the war it is credited to

Mars, the Bringer of War is routinely described as a response to the First World War, and the chronology does not support it. Holst began The Planets in 1914 and Mars was the first movement written, drafted before the outbreak in August of that year. Whatever it is about, it is not a reaction to trench warfare, because there had not yet been any.

What Mars actually is, technically, is a study in relentlessness. It is in five beats to the bar, an uneven metre that never settles into a march, and the same rhythmic figure repeats for almost the entire movement, mostly played col legno, with the wood of the bow struck against the string. The volume rises in steps rather than smoothly and the harmony grinds two unrelated chords together at the climax. Its influence on film music has been enormous, and it is the single clearest ancestor of the orchestral scoring used in science fiction and war films from the 1970s onwards.

Everything else Holst wrote, and why it is neglected

Holst produced a substantial catalogue across four decades, and outside The Planets very little of it holds a place in the repertoire. Five works have a real claim.

• The Hymn of Jesus, 1917, for two choruses, a semi-chorus and orchestra, sets a text from the apocryphal Acts of John and uses plainchant, unmeasured passages and choral writing in unrelated keys at once.
• Egdon Heath, 1927, an orchestral piece named after the landscape in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, is quiet, bleak and almost entirely without climax; Holst thought it his best work and it is played rarely.
• The St Paul's Suite, 1913, for string orchestra, was written for the school orchestra he taught and remains standard for student and amateur string groups.
• The two Suites for Military Band, 1909 and 1911, are foundational repertoire for wind bands worldwide.
• Savitri, 1908, a chamber opera for three singers and twelve instruments on a story from the Mahabharata, reflects an interest in Sanskrit literature he learned enough of to translate himself.

The neglect has a straightforward cause. The Planets is generous, colourful and immediately effective, and almost nothing else Holst wrote is any of those things. The later music gets thinner, drier and more austere as he goes on, moving away from exactly the qualities that made his one famous work famous. Audiences who arrive at Egdon Heath expecting Jupiter find the opposite of it, which is what Holst intended and what has kept the piece off programmes for a century.

Also in this programme

• The repertoireThe pieces that keep coming back, and why
• Edward ElgarThe Enigma Variations, the Cello Concerto and the symphonies
• Ralph Vaughan WilliamsThe Tallis Fantasia, the Lark and the symphonies