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'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 ).

* Mary Raith Holst ( born 1910 ), moved to Brigantine in 1939 with her husband Wallace and was the first group of three female cheerleader at Atlantic City High School.

Holst was a Baltic German born at Fellin ( Viljandi ) in Russian Livonia.

Their son Hermann V. von Holst, the future architect, was born in Freiburg in 1874.

With his finances secure, Holst married Emily Isobel Harrison, a fair-headed soprano, at Fulham Register Office on 22 June 1901, their union enduring until his death in 1934.

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 ).

During these years Holst also became interested in Hindu mysticism and spirituality, and this interest led to the composition of several works set to translations of Sanskrit texts, including: Sita ( 1899 – 1906 ), a three-act opera based on an episode in the Ramayana ; Sāvitri ( 1908 ), a chamber opera based on a tale from the Mahabharata ; 4 groups of Hymns from the Rig Veda ( 1908 – 14 ); and two texts originally by Kalidasa: Two Eastern Pictures ( 1909 – 10 ) and The Cloud Messenger ( 1913 ).

Holst and wife Isobel bought a cottage in Thaxted, Essex and, surrounded by medieval buildings and ample rambling opportunities, he started work on the suite that became his best known work, the orchestral suite The Planets.

Holst died on 25 May 1934, of complications following stomach surgery, in London.

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 ).

At a Queen's Hall symphony concert on 22 November of that year, Holst conducted Venus, Mercury and Jupiter ( this was the first public performance of Venus ).

Holst conducted the LSO in two recorded performances of The Planets: the first was an acoustic recording made in sessions between 1922 and 1924 ( now available on Pavilion Records ' Pearl label ); the second was made in 1926, and utilised the then-new electrical recording process ( in 2003, this was released on compact disc by IMP and later on Naxos outside the United States ).

In 2000, the Hallé Orchestra commissioned the English composer Colin Matthews, an authority on Holst, to write a new eighth movement, which he called " Pluto, the Renewer ".

Dedicated to the late Imogen Holst, Gustav Holst's daughter, it was first performed in Manchester on 11 May 2000, with Kent Nagano conducting the Hallé Orchestra.

This arrangement was issued on their second LP, In the Wake of Poseidon, although for copyright reasons it was renamed " The Devil's Triangle " and Robert Fripp claimed authorship, with Holst receiving no composer credit. A third progressive-rock band, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, performed an arrangement of " Jupiter " with lyrics which they entitled " Joybringer ". Black Metal / Viking Metal band Bathory arranged a section of " Jupiter " as the melody of the song " Hammerheart ", from the album Twilight of the Gods.

Marion Mahony recommended to von Holst that he hire Griffin to develop a landscape plan for the area surrounding the three houses on Milliken Place for which Wright had been hired in Decatur, Illinois.

Gustav Holst and Ninette de Valois lived in houses on this stretch, both of which have corresponding blue plaques.

The bucking horse Steamboat, the model on the Wyoming license plate, was stabled near Wheatland in a barn owned and maintained as a historical structure by Mike and Linda Holst.

The late Marianne Heiberg, married to former Foreign Minister Johan Jørgen Holst, was his aunt on his mother's side.

The group gave its first performance as the Amadeus Quartet at the Wigmore Hall in London on 10 January 1948, underwritten by Imogen Holst.

* Jan Henrik Holst: German politicians ' decision on March 30, 2006: Nazi orthography becomes obligatory in German schools!

A 2005 proposal by Holst, also reiterating a proposal of Swadesh from 1962, suggests that the Wakashan languages ( map on right ) spoken in British Columbia around and on Vancouver Island, are part of the same linguistic family as the Eskimo-Aleut languages.

Kinau was the eldest child of fisherman Heinrich Wilhelm Kinau and his wife, Metta Holst, on the Elbe island of Finkenwerder, near Hamburg.

His chosen style was what some regard as " typically American " i. e. based on American folk music, though Moore never actually used any authentic folk tunes but rather created his own ( much like Gustav Holst or Falla ).