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.

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 ).

Impressionism has also influenced at least some of the music of Manuel de Falla, Paul Dukas, Jean Sibelius, George Butterworth, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, John Ireland, Cyril Scott, Zoltán Kodály, Ottorino Respighi, Jacques Ibert, Bohuslav Martinu, Olivier Messiaen, Alan Hovhaness, Ned Rorem, György Ligeti, Selim Palmgren, and Toru Takemitsu, among others, as well as jazz musicians such as Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Claude Thornhill, Bud Powell, Dave Brubeck, Gil Evans, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Frank Kimbrough, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Shirley Horn and Esperanza Spalding, progressive rock musicians such as King Crimson, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, and Yes, the entire genre of post-rock, and electronic artists like Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh, as well as Aphex Twin and Autechre.

Luxemburg ’ s workerism and spontaneism are exemplary of positions later taken up by the far-left of the period – Pannekoek, Roland Holst, and Gorter in Holland, Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain, Gramsci in Italy, Lukacs in Hungary.

* 1874 – Gustav Holst, English composer ( d. 1934 )

* Gustav Holst composes The Planets, Opus 32.

* September 21 – Gustav Holst, English composer ( d. 1934 )

* May 25 – Gustav Holst, English composer ( The Planets ) ( b. 1874 )

The combined influence of Ravel, Hindu spiritualism and English folk tunes enabled Holst to free himself of the influence of Wagner and Strauss and to forge his own style.

Holst composed almost 200 works, including operas, ballets, choral hymns and songs.

An enthusiastic educator, Holst became music master at St Paul's Girls ' School in 1905 and director of music at Morley College in 1907, continuing in both posts until retirement.

Statue of Gustav Holst at his birthplace, Cheltenham, England.

Following his wife's death, Adolph von Holst moved with his sons to 1, Vittoria Walk, Cheltenham, and eventually married Mary Thorley Stone in 1885: she gave birth to two further sons, Matthias Ralph and Evelyn Thorley.

Holst and Vaughan Williams were able to criticise each other's compositions as they were being written.

Holst remained a socialist all his life.

Royal College of Music ( 1894 site ), where Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams studied in 1895.

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.

While young Lincoln's formal elementary education consisted approximately of a year's worth of classes from several itinerant teachers, he was mostly self-educated and was an avid reader.

It might also have been a pun on " all-has-read ", since Lovecraft was an avid reader in youth.

He was also an avid reader, interested in botany ( learning the Latin nomenclature of thousands of plants ), astrology, and Middle American prehistory.

In Hot Springs, Bill attended St. John's Catholic Elementary School, Ramble Elementary School, and Hot Springs High School – where he was an active student leader, avid reader, and musician.

He was an avid fisherman, golfer, painter and bridge player, and preferred active rather than passive forms of entertainment.

* William Randolph Hearst was an avid lover of dachshunds.

He was an avid tennis player until an injury in 1940, and drank an Old Fashioned with dinner.

At DAIMI, the CS department at Aarhus University, three CS students, avid players of XPilot and of Sid Meier's Civilization, which was a stand-alone PC game for DOS, decided to find out whether the two could be fused into an X-based multiplayer Civilization-like strategy game.

Ackerman was a Los Angeles, California-based magazine editor, science fiction writer and literary agent, a founder of science fiction fandom and possibly the world's most avid collector of genre books and movie memorabilia.

He was also an avid fan of radio comedy from an early age, becoming especially drawn to that of The Goon Show.

The queen herself was an avid reader of all of George Eliot's novels, being so impressed with Adam Bede that she commissioned the artist Edward Henry Corbould to paint scenes from the book.

After an agreement was reached with the European Union ( EU ) to increase Honduras's banana quota to the EU, the large banana companies were avid for additional land for increased production to meet the anticipated new demand from Europe.

An avid hunter, he obtained the epithet " the Fowler " because he was allegedly fixing his birding nets when messengers arrived to inform him that he was to be king.

Edgar Degas was both an avid photographer and a collector of Japanese prints.

The game again sparked controversy throughout a period of school shootings in the United States when it was found that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who committed the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, were avid players of the game.

Despite his enthusiasm for film, Jarmusch, an avid reader in his youth, had a greater interest in literature, a pursuit in which he was encouraged by his grandmother.

When Rousseau was 10, his father, an avid hunter, got into a legal quarrel with a wealthy landowner on whose lands he had been caught trespassing.

King George IV was also an avid fan of Audubon and a subscriber to the book.

Bentham was an early and staunch supporter of the utilitarian concept ( along with Hume ), an avid prison reformer, advocate for democracy, and strongly atheist.

) He continued to read the Times, which was not generally available in the USSR, listened to the BBC World Service, and was an avid follower of cricket.

He was the Democratic party leader in the United States Senate, the chairman of the Committee on Territories, an avid promoter of railroads, an aspirant to the presidency, and, above all, a fervent believer in popular sovereignty: the policy of letting the residents of a territory decide whether or not they would permit slavery to exist.

He was fond of travel, enjoying trips into the mountains, and was an avid walker.