Holst Gustav Holst

A Biography
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ISBN: 978-0-571-28109-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Gustav Holst was a leading figure in the new age of English music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His most celebrated work, The Planets, is an orchestral tour de force, but he wrote music of startling originality in many forms, drawing inspiration from sources as varied as English folksong, oriental melody, the Apocrypha and Sanskrit literature, as well as from writers such as Keats, Hardy, Bridges and Whitman. This biography, by his daughter Imogen, was first published by Faber in 1938 and revised in 1969. In it she quotes at length from his many letters to his friends - especially to his closest colleague Vaughan Williams - and draws on her personal memories of Holst's later years. Holst struggled all his life against bouts of ill-health and depression, but his remarkable and good-humoured resilience enabled him to compose great music in often difficult circumstances. He was essentially a very private person, and the huge popular success of The Planets in 1919 disconcerted him. Imogen Holst describes the effect of this sudden fame on her father, and records the late flowering of his music in the final years of his life.

Imogen Holst (1907-1984), the only child of Gustav Holst, was a musician of outstanding ability: composer conductor, writer and scholar, she was the first Director of Music in the Arts Department at Dartington in the 1940s; assistant to Benjamin Britten from 1952-64; an Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival, where she was a pioneer of early music; and friend, colleague and inspirer of many eminent musicians. For the last twenty years of her life she devoted much of her time to her father's legacy, performing recording and editing his music, as well as compiling the definitive Thematic Catalogue of his works for his centenary in 1974.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Holst, Imogen

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

‘YOU seem to have come into the world solely to make people happy‚’ Holst once wrote to a friend. ‘Well, after all, that’s only a round-about way of saying you’re a musician, isn’t it?’

Fifty years before this, he himself had come into the world.

It was on the 21st of September, in 1874, that a son was born to Clara, the wife of Adolph von Holst, at a small house in Pittville Terrace, Cheltenham. The baby was called Gustavus Theodore, for Adolph was conservative in these matters, and there had been a Gustavus in the family for generations.

There had also been a musician in the family since the days when Adolph’s Swedish grandfather Matthias had lived in Riga, composing a quantity of unremarkable music, or teaching the harp to the Imperial Family at St. Petersburg.

Matthias von Holst was a competent musician, but his political ideas were so unwelcome that by the beginning of the nineteenth century he had to escape from Riga with his Russian wife and his small son Gustavus Valentine.

He came by boat to England. It was an unknown country to him. He had no friends there, and no prospects of getting any work, and at first he found it difficult to understand the language. But it seemed an hospitable place for an exile, and he unpacked his harps and his music in a house near Fitzroy Square and began searching London for piano pupils.

Gustavus Valentine grew up to be a composer as well as a pianist. When the time came for him to earn his living he tried playing at fashionable ‘At Homes’, but he found it an unsatisfactory way of making music, for his patrons treated him with a snobbish discourtesy that was almost unendurable. Once, when he was playing every day at a large country house in Sussex, his younger brother Theodore stayed with him, to cheer him up when he got back to his lodgings. Theodore was a painter whose heavy, sombre pictures were hung in the Academy and admired, many years later, by Rossetti. Although his paintings were gloomy, Theodore possessed an inexhaustible sense of humour: it was a sense of humour that he may possibly have bequeathed to the great-nephew who was to be called after him.

From Sussex he wrote:

Vine’s Cottage,
Sea Houses,
Eastbourne.
October 13, 1832.

Dearest Parents and Sisters,

It is a weather here such as one only can find at Spitzbergen or at Schimborasse. Howl! howl! howl! ye winds! This dark brown month brings no joy on its course. I asked a person if it always rains here, and he cooly answered ‘Yees’.

Gustavus has been at Lady C’s each day from 12 till 5 o’clock and in the Evening from 8 till 11. The distance till 11. is more than a mile, and to walk this in the infernal rain and wind is too much of a joke. She makes many offers, (but never thinks of putting them in practice,) such as:—‘Will you have the carriage?’ (asking when the whole Heavens are coming down) or ‘Would you like to take, some lunch?’ (when the last spark of animation is extinguishing.) In fact he has serious thoughts of cutting it altogether.

The enclosed sketch is an accurate tho’ feint representation of our journey over the Hills or Downs to Brighton in a most delightful and no doubt for the lungs salutary MIST. But before I detail further, it will be as well to give you the Anlass dazu:—Gustavus had returned the Evening before quite miscompable and worn out with musical Strapatzen and Lady C’s Quinkerlieren. They wanted him to come the next day, but he said ‘No, not tomorrow if you please.’ ‘Then in the Evening?’ ‘No, not tomorrow Evening’—in fact, he intended to have a rest or holy-day, so we resolved to start the next Morning at six punctum for Brighton and be Damned to it. I was very loth to quit my warm bed with aching bones, but we cut our sticks, and we had but trudged some way up the Hills when we found ourselves gradually incircled by Mist, first whirling in Eddies on the heights above, then rolling down in magestic and mysterious grandeur like Nature’s Pall. We were wet to the Heart’s pip in a trice, but now we were booked we cried ‘Presto! on! on!’—with dispairing resulution passing East Dean till we arrived at Seaford and immediately order’d Breakfast and got into the Kitchen to Dry our Shells to the discomfiture of half a dozen Kitchen maids who scud and left us masters of the field. Then we had a famous tuck out, and wander’d on, ganz gemütlich, fröhlich und guter Dinge thro’ Newhaven, Blackincot and Rottindean, and at last arrived at Brighton where we walked all game and gumtion amongst the fashionables on the Parade, steyn, Pier etc. till 4 o’clock. Then we had some oysters and Pears, filled our pipes and paid a visit to the Piozzi’s who are damned ungrateful wretches judging of what they speak of Ziliani who has done so much for them. They told us that Costa of the Opera gave a Concert there with Vigano, Tamburini, Donzelli, Grisi and other Trumps, but none of the Brightonian Nobs would patronise it because—now guess? (modesty hide thy hide) because PIOZZI was not engaged. The next morning we got up with stiff legs, returning (leaving Gaeity behind us) per Coach to Eastbourne. Thus ended our heroic undertaking which we found very agreable and pleasant.

I pass my time here sehr rasch und führe ein recht schlampampen Leben. I amuse myself with playing the harp a little and when my fingers get sore I get out on the sea shore. There I sit and brood, giving full swing and scope to my Ideas:—no one to disturb me, nothing around but sky, sea and sand. Ah! quel délice. Then, when the tide is low, I sketch a little on the sands to astonish the oysters, come home, whistle for an hour, read Hoffmann, then get the dinner prepared and watch another hour at the window for Gustavus….

In constant thoughts of you,

Your affectionate and most

Dutiful Son

THEODORE.

Ich vermiss sehr einen köstlicher Magenliqueur das WORMWOOD heisst.

Soon after this Gustavus decided to waste no more time on the Lady C’s of this world. Teaching would be infinitely preferable.

He settled in Cheltenham with an English wife, and before very long the pupils flocked to him. At his ‘musical afternoons’ twenty-four young ladies seated at twelve grand pianos would give much pleasure to a select audience by their simultaneous rendering of a classical overture. Gustavus would stand in their midst and conduct for them.

In his spare time he composed little pieces for the harp or the piano. A Pleasant Afternoon on the Alps’ was one of his most popular works. Eighty years later it was recorded by a gramophone company, to the astonishment of several admirers of The Planets, who found it difficult to reconcile two such contrasting idioms under the same name.

His eldest son, Gustavus Matthias, was a precociously brilliant pianist, and when he was still a child he was made to practise ten hours a day. As he grew up, his compositions eclipsed those of his father in their tunefulness and in their display of technical fireworks, while he himself showed such irresistible charm that one after another the young ladies of Cheltenham lost their hearts to him. Unfortunately his charm was not balanced by very much discretion, and after appearing at a fancy-dress ball without any clothes on, an episode that reduced Cheltenham to a horrified silence, he was given a musical appointment in Glasgow and told that he need not come back.

His brother Adolph took his place at home. Adolph had studied music in Hamburg, where he stayed with his aunt Caroline von Holst, who was a harpist at the Prussian court.

There was more than mere brilliance in Adolph’s piano playing. He had a natural touch that was clear and limpid, and he had achieved a finger technique that allowed him to do what he liked with the instrument. Every note he played had a singing quality that was peculiarly his own, and those who heard it never forgot it. His capacity for hard work was unlimited, and he refused to rest until he had reached his own high standard of perfection. He once wrote to a pupil: ‘I have been practising a passage in octaves for at least five years off and on, and it isn’t right yet, so I have never played the piece in public.’

Adolph had a strong sense of justice and integrity: he was quick-tempered, obstinate, and inclined to be sarcastic, and he often asked for advice but seldom took it.

In Cheltenham he led a busy life, giving orchestral concerts at the Rotunda, playing the organ at one of the churches, and teaching a large number of piano pupils.

It was one of these pupils, a Miss Clara Lediard, whom he married in 1872. Clara’s father had been a highly respected solicitor in Cirencester, and the family disapproved of the idea of Clara marrying a musician, even though he taught some of the best families in Cheltenham and seemed a thoroughly conservative English gentleman in spite of his outlandish name.

Clara’s mother would have liked to have been sympathetic, remembering her own family history. Her Spanish grandmother had been an actress. Not a very brilliant actress, according to the dramatic critics of her day, but then she had had little chance of improving her technique, for an Irish peer had fallen in love with her and had carried her off to a...