Holst also taught at the Royal College of Music and advised Rubbra to apply for an open scholarship there.

Standard classics were not neglected ( there were memorable performances of Beethoven ’ s Eroica and, in the Centenary Season, with the Huddersfield Choral Society, that composer ’ s Ninth Symphony ) but works as diverse as Hindemith ’ s Symphonic Metamorphoses, Berlioz ’ s Harold in Italy, Prokofiev ’ s Firth Symphony, Respighi ’ s The Pines of Rome, Janacek ’ s Sinfonietta, Holst ’ s The Planets and the Mussorgsky / Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition figured in Butterworth ’ s early years.

Gustav Theodore Holst ( born Gustavus Theodore von Holst, 21 September 187425 May 1934 ) was an English composer.

He was the brother of Hollywood actor Ernest Cossart and father of the composer and conductor Imogen Holst, who wrote a biography of him in 1938.

Holst was born on 21 September 1874, at 4, Pittville Terrace ( named today Clarence Road ) Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England.

Holst's great-grandfather, Matthias von Holst, was of Nordic origin, and came to England in 1802 from Riga, Latvia.

Holst's father, Adolph von Holst, was organist and choirmaster at All Saints ' Church in Pittville.

Holst's mother, Clara Cox von Holst ( née Lediard ), who died in 1882, was a singer and pianist who bore two sons, Gustav and Emil Gottfried ( who later became Ernest Cossart, a film actor in Hollywood ).

Holst was christened Gustavus Theodore von Holst, after his grandfather and his great-uncle Theodor, a painter.

Vaughan Williams's own music was in general quite different from Holst ’ s, but he praised Holst's work abundantly and the two men developed a shared interest in exploring and maintaining the English vocal and choral tradition as found primarily in folk song, madrigals and church music.

While at the Royal College of Music, Holst fell in love with the music of Wagner, which he was able to hear at Covent Garden.

Holst also wrote an orchestral Walt Whitman Overture in 1899, which was given a world premiere recording by the Munich Symphony Orchestra, as well as a recording by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 1905, Holst was appointed Director of Music at St Paul's Girls ' School in Hammersmith, London.

Holst was an avid rambler.

After the lukewarm reception of his choral work The Cloud Messenger in 1912, Holst was again off travelling, financing a trip to Spain with fellow composers Balfour Gardiner and brothers Clifford and Arnold Bax with funds from an anonymous donation.

Despite being shy, Holst was fascinated by people and society, and had always believed that the best way to learn about a city was to get lost in it.

It was in Spain that Clifford Bax introduced Holst to astrology, a hobby that was to inspire the later Planets suite.

( According to the documentary by Tony Palmer In the Bleak Midwinter, Holst hated this association because the text was the opposite of what he believed.

) His daughter Imogen later recalled of " I Vow to Thee " that " At the time when he was asked to set these words to music, Holst was so over-worked and over-weary that he felt relieved to discover they ' fitted ' the tune from Jupiter ".

At the onset of World War I, Holst tried to enlist but was rejected because of his bad eyes, bad lungs and bad digestion.

Holst became something of " an anomaly, a famous English composer ", and was busy with conducting, lecturing and teaching obligations.

By this time, Holst was going out of fashion, and the piece was poorly reviewed ( although this may have as much to do with the austere nature of the work ).

Holst had hoped to build his career partly as a pianist, but stricken from adolescence with a nerve condition that increasingly affected the movement of his right hand, he eventually gave up the piano for the trombone.

The poetry of Walt Whitman also had a profound effect on Holst, as it did with many of his contemporaries, and he set Whitman's words in " Dirge for Two Veterans " and The Mystic Trumpeter ( 1904 ).

Holst shared in his friend ’ s admiration for the simplicity and economy of these melodies, and their use in his compositions is one of his music ’ s most recognisable features.

Shortly after his return in 1913, St Paul's Girls School opened a new music wing, and Holst composed the still popular St Paul's Suite for the occasion.

A year later, Holst first heard Schoenberg ’ s Five Pieces for Orchestra, an " ultra-modern " set of five movements employing " extreme chromaticism " ( the consistent use of all 12 musical notes ).

Holst himself adapted the theme from " Jupiter " as a hymn tune under the name of " Thaxted ", specifically for the words " I Vow to Thee My Country ".

Holst conducted it again, with the same orchestra and for the same company, in an electrical recording of 1926.

Holst did complete a scherzo for the symphony before his death ; this music has been recorded.

Towards the end of his life, Holst wrote Choral Fantasia ( 1930 ), and he was commissioned by the BBC to write a piece for military band ; the resulting Hammersmith was a tribute to the place where he had spent most of his life, a musical expression of the London borough ( of Hammersmith ), which begins with an attempt to recreate the haunting sound of the River Thames sleepily flowing its way.

Interested as ever in new media, Holst wrote a score for the Associated Sound Film Industries picture ' The Bells ' in which Holst believed he appeared as an extra in a crowd scene.

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 liked to cast his friends ' horoscopes for fun.

The Planets as a work in progress was originally scored for a 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, and it was in this incarnation that it became enormously popular.

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 ).

The composer's name was given as ' Gustav von Holst ' — by the time he wrote " Mercury " in 1916 he had dropped the ' von ', for he signed the score of that movement separately as ' Gustav Holst '.

It is perhaps instructive to realise Holst 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.

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 ".

Holst, however, expressed no interest in writing a movement for the new planet.

* Two pianos ( duo ) – Holst also created a version for two pianos.