Download The Secret Life of Holst`s The Planets

The Secret Life of Holst’s The Planets
with grateful acknowledgement of
Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas
The music of Holst’s The Planets has been used to conjure images of Martian canyons,
Saturn’s multi-hued rings, and Venus’s murky clouds. It has evoked the serenity of the
Morning Star, the gaseous blueness of Neptune, and the storm raging in Jupiter’s red eye.
As a soundtrack, it has accompanied images from the Cassini spacecraft to the Hubble
telescope. In fact, it would be hard to think of any work of art—compared with Holst’s
The Planets—which is so famously associated with something it has nothing to do with.
Gustav Holst had a powerful set of images in mind while composing The Planets, but
they were not of the physical planets, nor of the Roman gods whose names were given to
them. His inspiration came instead from the archetypes—aspects of human personality
and behavior—associated with the planets since antiquity. Holst was concerned not with
outer space, but with inner space; with the psyche. In a word, astrology.
According to astrologers, the movement and position of celestial bodies affect experience
in the human sphere. While Holst did not believe in a causal relationship between the
planets and events on earth, he did consider the planetary archetypes to be profound
symbols of our individual and collective psyches. He saw the patterns described by
astrology as intrinsically connected to artistic expression, mythology, and all human
culture.
Mars begins Holst’s suite, not Mercury. The reason is an astrological one, tied to the
Martian archetype. Mars is the initiator; the one who sets things in motion. Mars’s Greek
name is Ares, the god of war. Ares, in turn, is associated with the constellation Aries, the
Ram. Aries appears as the first sign of the Zodiac, coming at the spring equinox, and
standing for fresh vigor and new beginnings. Holst’s music has the character of a
relentless march, but not a normal march in four-four time. Instead it has five beats to the
bar, keeping the listener off-balance. This is part of Mars’s aggressive stance. But there
are other qualities in the music which are not warlike, including courage, exuberance, and
vigor.
Venus is the principle of desire, love, and beauty; the impulse to create harmony and
relationship; and artistic and aesthetic experience. This is Aphrodite, the goddess of love
and beauty, whose energy stands in opposition to that of Mars. Only Venus can fully
disarm Mars, and she is well equipped to do so.
Mercury is the principle of mind and communication; the faculty of language, reason,
and Logos—the word. Mercury is the messenger god. Holst had Mercury in his natal
chart. He was indeed a man of the mind and of reason. He was also an inventor of new
languages, which we find in the music of Mercury. Much of this movement is written in
two keys at once, possessing different key signatures simultaneously.
Jupiter is the principle of expansion, magnitude, and elevation; of progress and
improvement; success and abundance; and the capacity for optimism or “joviality.” The
Greek name is Zeus, king of the Olympian gods. Jupiter is the middle movement of the
seven movements of The Planets. It concludes a four-movement structure that closely
resembles a symphony. It launches a new four-movement structure that also approximates
a symphonic form, though one that is far stranger and more progressive than the first half
of the work. In the middle of Jupiter is a broad and expressive hymn, much loved and
universally popular. It is found in hymnals of many demoninations; it was performed at
the funeral service of Princess Diana. Its touching and forthright declamation stands at
the ‘heart of the heart’ of The Planets.
Saturn was Holst’s favorite movement. The impression is of a human life in its final
stages, moving from the slowness of old age to a crisis of mortality, finally transitioning
to a freshly luminous world. Saturn is the principle of limits and the constraints of time;
of tradition, age, and maturity; of the capacity for discipline, thoroughness, and wisdom.
The Greek name is Kronos, the god of time, the stern father of the gods.
Uranus brings us to the outer planets, and to a strange new world. Uranus begins with
four powerful notes, delivered first by trumpets and trombones, then answered by the two
tubas, and finished off powerfully by the timpani. When audiences first heard the music
that follows these four notes, they thought of Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, well
known to contemporary listeners from Disney’s Fantasia. You too might be reminded of
Mickey’s water experiment gone awry.
I have a conjecture about Uranus that I cannot prove. It involves an alphabet game
popular with composers. If one were to write down the letters “G–U–S–T–A–V H.” and
use only those letters that correspond to note names—G–Eb–A–B—one is left with the
opening four notes—and the motto—of the movement. [In the German system, which is
the one most often used, S becomes Eb, and H becomes B.] It may be that in this way,
Holst has put his signature on the movement. It is worth noting that Uranus is the
astrological principle of creativity, originality, and innovation— apt for a composer of
Holst’s ingenuity.
Neptune is associated with the transcendent, spiritual, ideal, and imaginative dimensions
of life; with the subtle, formless, timeless, and infinite; with oceanic states of mind,
dreams and visions; with myth, art, and religion. There are many watery and nebulous
effects in Holst’s orchestration suggesting dreams and visions, especially the swirling
effects created by soft, rapid running figures in the harps and strings.
Holst saves his most stunning musical invention for the final bars. Amidst these misty
otherworldly sounds, a women’s chorus sneaks in singing just a single note. Their voices
are heard from afar, as if communicating from beyond. They begin to sing in
counterpoint, creating strangely ambiguous harmonies, until their sound starts to recede,
eventually approaching a vanishing point. The impression made on the listener—difficult
to achieve in performance—should be that these harmonies have moved to a distance
beyond the reach of mortal hearing, but that they continue sounding for eternity.
Holst had far-ranging interests in philosophy and metaphysics, and was greatly
influenced by Eastern thought and aesthetics. Over the course of The Planets, Holst leads
away from the sharp duality of war and love presented in the first two movements and
into a strange new world. The music no longer presents sharp contrasts of opposing
musical ideas, and introduces instead a subtle interweaving of heterogeneous elements.
By the time we arrive at Neptune, a gentle interplay of disparate elements offers a deep,
strange comfort.
A book Holst studied closely was Everybody’s Astrology by Alan Leo. In its final chapter
he would have read these assertions:
“The first idea to comprehend is the fact that each of us contains a portion of the
specialized life of the Great Angels who embrace the planetary chain …
“Each great angel represents a modification of the consciousness of the Great Spirit of
our solar system…
“We ourselves are developing to higher states and similarly have passed through great
periods of a like evolution in other worlds…
“The life of those standing higher in the scale of evolution affects those next below: as
one advances all advance…
“The planetary forces are producing a certain note, as it were, a note of a certain definite
pitch, intensity, and quality.”
Holst’s aim seems to have been to write down that “note,” and to follow its progression
into “higher states.” The sound of the treble choir at the work’s conclusion—performed at
the premiere by his own gifted students of the St. Paul’s Girls’ School—sound very much
like the “pitch, intensity, and quality” of “planetary forces.” Like a mystic poet, Holst
offers us an expression of human life as part of the divine cosmic scheme.