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Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

First Choral Symphony, Op. 41 (1923–4)

First performance at the Proms

Prelude: Invocation to Pan (Andante)
1. Song and Bacchanal (Andante – Allegretto)
2. Ode on a Grecian Urn (Molto adagio)
3. Scherzo and Trio: Fancy – Folly’s Song (Allegro)
4. Finale (Quasi andante – Lento)

Susan Gritton soprano
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC National Chorus of Wales

Gustav Holst composed his First Choral Symphony in 1923–24 for the 1925 Leeds Festival. (As early as 1923 he intended to write a ‘Second Choral Symphony’, on poems of George Meredith, but this never advanced beyond the sketch stage, perhaps because of the poor critical reception that the First received.) By the time he had finished the preliminary sketches at the end of 1923 he was seriously ill from overwork and had to give up all conducting, lecturing and teaching for a year. An anonymous gift of money (actually from a director of Rolls-Royce), intended to give him more leisure to compose, enabled him to live alone for most of 1924 in Thaxted, where for the first time in his life he was able to give his own music sustained and continuous attention, rather than snatching time for composition in evenings and weekends. He told friends that he was ‘at last leading the life of a real composer’. The first draft of the symphony was now, apparently, entirely reworked, a process completed by May 1925, and then refined and orchestrated with great care.

The symphony was the first really large-scale work Holst had been able to write since The Planets had made him a national celebrity, and was awaited with considerable interest. But though the world premiere in Leeds Town Hall on 7 October 1925 (with Dorothy Silk as soloist and the Leeds Festival Chorus and London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates) was reasonably well received, the first London performance on 29 October, given at Queen’s Hall by the same artists (in a Royal Philharmonic Society concert bizarrely combined with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony) was a distinct failure. The idiosyncratic choice of texts outraged literary sensibilities, music critics found the Bacchanale insufficient in debauchery, the choirs found the music difficult to sing. As a result the work was never performed again in Holst’s lifetime, though he continued to think that it was one of his best works. It is only since the 1960s that it has gradually been recognised as one of his most important and characteristic utterances.

Keats was Holst’s favourite poet (he once called him ‘the only writer with the soul of an artist’) and the text he assembled testifies to his intimate knowledge Keats’s output and the care with which he thought about the poems in relation to symphonic form. Apart from the slow movement, which is a setting of one of the best-known poems in the English language, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Holst chose relatively obscure poems that allowed him to think in large-scale forms appropriate to the genre. The words of the first movement are assembled from passages in the seldom-read Endymion, while those of the finale are deftly derived from the ‘Hymn to Apollo’ and ‘Hymn to Apollo’ as well as from manuscript poems that Keats had written on blank pages of an edition of the works of Jacobean dramatists Beaumont and Fletcher. 

Keats’s great theme, which he pursued at various levels of literary sophistication, was the transformative and redemptive potential of poetry – its ability to transform human life and redeem grief and sorrow within a larger, positive aspiration. His touchstone for this, as for his elder contemporary Hölderlin, was the legend and culture of ancient Greece, from Arcadian idyll to Attic perfection of art. By his selection of texts Holst made that the great theme of his symphony, but implicitly expanded it so that music, the infuser and enlivener of the words, becomes the ultimate redemptive art. In fact he was wise to choose so much of Keats’s less-than-best poetry, for the good but not great verses are given point and substance by the music. The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, a poem so great it evokes awe, leaves the music very little to do, except exercise an exquisite restraint. This Holst understood very well, and it is a miracle that he managed to put so much of himself into his nearly self-effacing setting.  

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The preludial ‘Invocation to Pan’ emerges impressively out of mysterious orchestral depths, the voices chanting upon a low B that is resonated several octaves below by double-basses (tuned to the B below their normal bottom C), with a chromatic counter-subject rising like the dispersing mists of morning. An free-ranging solo for melancholic unaccompanied viola enunciates the rising fourths that are a binding motif throughout the symphony. It introduces the soprano soloist and her Phrygian-mode lament, which is rudely and uproariously interrupted by the Bacchanal, the principal portion of the first movement. Its sparkling 7/8 rhythmic pattern, built on the perfect-fourth interval, percussive xylophone and col legno strings (striking with reverse of the bow) and incisive word-setting carry all before them in depicting the triumph of Bacchus, a scene worthy of an Italian Renaissance painting.

‘Not mysterious, but everything clear-cut, like sun rising on frost,’ Holst wrote of the muted rising fifths that open the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. The Arcadian revels have now been caught, memorialised by art and time, and his slightly chilly music has the static quality we associate with his treatment of the remoter heavenly bodies in The Planets. Any sense of motion is glacially slow. There are the barest echoes and suggestions of the ‘soft pipes and timbrels’ of Keats’s text, and the chilly harmony and scoring for the lines about the heat of passion (‘a burning forehead, and a parching tongue’) perfectly catches the paradox in Keats’s conception. The music warms for the sacrificial procession over pizzicato basses, a familiar Holstian musical image, then chills again for the innermost revelation that ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’, with the soprano left to deliver the last word.

From the sublime to the light fantastic. The swift-moving Scherzo (‘Fancy’) is first cousin to ‘Mercury’ in The Planets, delicate, restless, active, ever-roving, a kaleidoscope of rapidly changing vocal and instrumental colours. If the Scherzo is elfin and aerial, the Trio (‘Folly’s Song’) is earthy, heavy-footed, broad-bellied, carried on a heavy ground bass (repeating pattern) in open fifths on trombone and tuba. Its gross physical vitality is a perfect counterpart to the Scherzo, which now returns for its return in purely orchestral guise, letting the voices rest.

The soprano, unaccompanied, begins the finale by invoking the spirit of poetry, and is joined by the chorus in a Hymn to Apollo, poetry’s (and music’s) god. This movement is at once the loosest and most eventful of the four. As it proceeds it becomes a noble march in praise of the very different qualities of the great poets; and now the line of descent leads from Greece and Rome (Homer, Virgil), via Italy (Tasso) to Britain (Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton). The full forces then combine in praise of Apollo, and the soprano’s invocation returns, while the chorus quietly sings the praises of poets once mortal, now immortal. The symphony ends softly, gazing into that limitless realm of the imagination into which the ‘Bards of Passion and of Mirth’ have ‘fled far away’.

Programme note by Calum MacDonald

Calum MacDonald is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and is Editor of ‘Tempo’. As Malcolm MacDonald he has written books on Brahms, John Foulds, Havergal Brian and Varèse, and a new expanded edition of his ‘Schoenberg’ was recently published (OUP).

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