Gustav Holst was born into a strong musical family in Cheltenham. His father had hoped Gustav would become a concert pianist, but no one realised that Gustav had terrible eyesight, so he had no glasses and couldn’t play well. Instead, he started composing, hoping for a scholarship to the Royal College, which was won by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (the British-Sierra Leonean composer who eventually settled in Croydon).
His father took out a loan to fund Gustav’s study at the Royal College, and he studied with Parry, Bridge, and Stanford. He could afford standing tickets at the opera and admired Wagner’s operas. He became very close friends with Ralph Vaughan Williams, and with William Morris. In 1895, the 200th anniversary of Purcell’s death, he heard Dido and Aeneas which he later said informed his compositional style to find an ‘English idiom’.
He became busy as a teacher, holding positions at James Allen’s Girls’ School, Dulwich, St Paul’s Girls’, and Morley College. When St Paul’s built a new music department, he wrote the St Paul’s Suite to celebrate, seven years ahead of his success with The Planets. He had a house in Thaxted, Essex – planes line up with the spire of the church before landing at Stansted airport.
The Suite is in four movements, and the last combines the tune of the folk song Greensleeveswith the music of the Dargason, which itself is a folk song first heard in Holst’s Second Suite in F for Military Band. The movements are:
Jig: Vivace
Ostinato: Presto
Intermezzo: Andante con moto
Finale (The Dargason): Allegro
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