Imogen Holst

Imogen Holst Composer and conductor
File:Imogen in old age.jpg
Era	20th century
Works	Compositions

Imogen Clare Holst CBE (12 April 1907 – 9 March 1984) was an English composer, arranger, conductor and festival organiser. The only daughter of the composer Gustav Holst, she is best known for her work at Dartington Hall in the 1940s, and as the long-serving director of the Aldeburgh Festival. She was a prolific writer on music, particularly on the works of her father on which she is considered the principal authority.

Born at a time when her father was struggling for recognition, Imogen Holst showed precocious talent in composing and performance. She developed a particular enthusiasm for folk dance and folk music, and became an active member of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). After education at Eothen achool and St Paul's Girls' School, she entered the Royal College of Music, where she developed her skills in composing and conducting and won several prizes. Unable for health reasons to follow her initial ambitions to be a pianist or a dancer, Holst spent most of the 1930s teaching, and as a full-time organiser for the EFDSS. In the first years of the Second World war she worked as an organiser for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA). In 1942 she began work at Dartington, where among other innovations she founded and developed the music course, and started an orchestra.

In the early 1950s Holst became a musical assistant to Benjamin Britten, and also began to help with the organisation of the annual Aldeburgh music festival. She assumed the directorship of the festival in 1956, and during the following 20 years guided it to a position of pre-eminence in British musical life. In 1964 she gave up her work as Britten's assistant, to concentrate on her father's music, which had fallen into some neglect and much of which had never been catalogued. Apart from her CBE appointment she received numerous academic honours, including honorary membership of the Royal College of Music. She died at Aldeburgh, and is buried in the churchyard there.

Life

Childhood and education

Birth and family background

The house in Barnes where the Holst family lived between 1908 and 1913

Imogen Holst was born on 14 April 1907, at 31 Grena Road, Richmond, a riverside suburb to the west of London. Her parents were Gustav Theodore Holst (born Gustavus Theodore von Holst), an aspiring composer then working as a music teacher, and (Emily) Isobel, née Harrison. The Holst family, which had moved to England in 1802, was of mixed Swedish, German and Latvian ancestry and had been musicians for several generations. Gustav Holst's grandfather Gustavus Valentine had been a composer and harpist; his son Adolph, Gustav's father, was an organist and choirmaster. Gustav followed the family tradition, and attended the Royal College of Music (RCM) between 1893 and 1898. As part of his musical training, Gustav acted as conductor of an amateur group, the Hammersmith Socialist Choir, where Isobel Harrison was one of his choristers. He was immediately attracted to her; she took longer to be convinced, but eventually she accepted him. They were married on 22 July 1901, at Fulham Registry Office.

At the time that Imogen was born—the couple's only child—Gustav was deeply absorbed in Indian music, to the extent that he considered naming his daughter "Sita". Since leaving the RCM, Gustav had worked mainly as an orchestral trombonist and répétiteur, while attempting to establish himself as a composer. From 1905 his main employment was as a music teacher; in 1907 he held posts at James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich (where he succeeded Ralph Vaughan Williams), and St Paul's Girls' School (SPGS) in Hammersmith, where he became director of music. He also taught evening classes at Morley College, an adult education centre in the Waterloo district of London. Shortly after Imogen's birth the family moved from Grena Road to a small house by the river in nearby Barnes, which they rented from one of Gustav's aunts. Imogen's main memories of this house were of her father working in his composing room on the top floor, which she was forbidden to visit, and of his efforts to teach her folk-songs.

Schooling

Descriptions of Imogen as a small child indicate that she had blue eyes, fair hair, an oval face reminiscent of her father's, and a rather prominent nose inherited from her mother. In 1912, at the age of five, she joined the kindergarten class at the Froebel Institute, situated conveniently close to St Paul's Girls' School. She made an immediate impression; in her first end-of-term report the headmistress described her as "a dear little girl, & full of promise". Imogen spent five years at the school, interruped by a long convalescence in 1915 after a bout of typhoid fever. She recuperated at Thaxted in Essex, where the Holsts had rented a country cottage as a refuge from London life, and where Gustav instituted an annual Whitsun Festival in 1916.

Gustav Holst circa 1920, drawn by William Rothenstein

In 1917, aged ten, Imogen began at Eothen, a small private school for girls in Caterham, founded and run by the Misses Catharine and Winifred Pye. One reason she was sent there was that Jane Joseph, Gustav's star pupil from SPGS, taught music there. Imogen quickly settled into the school; an enthusiastic letter home, dated 17 July 1917, tells of "compertishions, and ripping prizes, and strawberries and cream for tea". Apart from the normal educational curriculum, Imogen studied piano with Eleanor Shuttleworth, violin with André Mangeot (described as "topping") and theory with Jane Joseph ("ripping"). Under Joseph's tuition Imogen produced her first compositions—three instrumental pieces and some Christmas carol tunes—which she proudly numbered as Ops 1, 2, 3 and 4. In her last summer term at Eothen, in 1920, Imogen wrote the music and designed the choreography for a "Dance of the Nymphs and Shepherds", in which she led the dancers when the work was performed at the school on 9 July.

When Imogen left Eothen in December 1920 she hoped to attend the Ginner-Mawer School of Dance and Drama, where Ruby Ginner taught a version of modern dance known as "Greek Dance". However, in January 1921 the school rejected her on health grounds; she was thought to be lacking the required stamina for a dancing career. For the next six months Imogen was educated by a governess at home, while continuing her violin and piano studies with Mangeot and Shuttleworth respectively. She was able, at Whitsun, to participate as a dancer in a production of Purcell's semi-opera from 1690, Dioclesian, a version largely devised and arranged by Jane Joseph. This was held in the grounds of SPGS, and repeated in Hyde Park a week later.

In September 1921 Imogen became a pupil at St Paul's, where her father still worked as Director of Music. As the Holsts were at this time without a London house, for her first year she boarded, an experience which she disliked intensely. Her unhappiness did not prevent her, in July 1922, from giving a performance on the piano of a Bach Prelude and Fugue which won warm praise from Joseph. In that same month the Holsts acquired a house in the Barons Court district of London, and Imogen ceased to board. Her remaining SPGS years were generally happy and successful. She developed a strong interest in folk music and dance, and in 1923 became a member of the English Folk Dance Society. In July 1923 she won the Alice Lupton Junior Piano Prize, but her chances of distinction as a pianist were marred when she began to develop phlebitis in her left arm. In her final year at SPGS, while preparing for admission to the Royal College of Music, Imogen found time to establish a Folk Dance Society in the School. At a Speech Day concert late in July 1925, her choral work An Essex Rhapsody was performed. Imogen, who was awarded the senior Alice Lupton prize, played a Chopin étude and the first performance of Gustav Holst's Toccata.

Royal College of Music

The Royal College of Music

Before beginning at the RCM in the autumn of 1926, Imogen spent a year studying composition with Herbert Howells and piano with Adine O'Neill, while otherwise occupying herself with EFDS activities. At the RCM her schedule was constructed around her two major studies: piano with Kathleen Long, and composition with George Dyson. Her other studies included conducting, under William H. Reed and, to her delight, a ballet class run by Penelope Spencer. She quickly showed her prowess as a conductor in December 1926 when she led the college's "Third Orchestra" in the opening movement of Mozart's "Prague" Symphony. This and other performances on the podium led the Daily Telegraph to comment: "No woman has yet been able to establish a secure tenure of the conductor's platform ... Imogen Holst may prove the first of her sex to do this". At the end of her first year she played her own "Theme and Variations" for solo piano at an RCM Informal Concert.

In her second RCM year Imogen concentrated on composition and produced several chamber works: a violin sonata, an oboe quintet, and a suite for woodwind. She took her first steps towards personal independence when she moved from the family home to a bedsit near Kensington Gardens, although she maintained strong ties with her parents. According to Rosamond Strode's biographical sketch, her father, "while watching her progress, never interfered but gave excellent advice when needed". Meanwhile Imogen's horizons were broadening with travel; in 1928 she went to Belgium with the EFDS, took an Italian holiday, and made an extended trip to Germany with a group known as "The Travelling Morrice", formed to promote international understanding through music and dance. In October 1928 she won the RCM's Cobbett prize for an original chamber composition, with her Phantasy String Quartet, and shortly afterwards was awarded the Morley Scholarship for the "best all-round student". The quartet was broadcast by the BBC on 20 March 1929, but the achievement was overshadowed by the news, that month, of the premature death of Jane Joseph, Imogen's childhood teacher and mentor.

In the winter of 1929 Imogen made her first visit to Canada and the United States, as part of an EFDS party. Back home, she worked on the composition piece she was to present for her RCM finals in June 1930, a suite for brass band entitled The Unfortunate Traveller. Despite some apprehension on her part, the piece passed the examiners' scrutiny and was scheduled to be played at the college's end-of-year concert in July. Imogen was awarded her ARCM diploma, and learned also that she had been awarded an Octavia Travelling Scholarship for study of composition abroad.

Travelling and teaching

Freelance

In 1931 Holst began earning her living as a freelance musician, though her hopes of being a concert pianist were dashed by incipient phlebitis in her left arm.

War: travelling for CEMA

A CEMA concert during the Second World War (a performance of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf by the Ballet Rambert)

In the wake of the positive critical reception accorded to her biography of her father, Holst reviewed her career to that point and decided that she should, in her own words, "cut loose" from amateur music-making—including teaching—and concentrate on her own professional development. As a first step, at Easter 1939 she resigned form her position at Eothen. After fulfilling longstanding EFDSS commitments in April and May, Holst and her friend Anne Crittall departed for an extended tour of Switzerland which included the Lucerne Festival. Towards the end of August, as war became increasingly likely, the pair broke off the trip and returned home.

Holst's first significant war work was on behalf of the Bloomsbury House Refugee Committee, which worked on behalf of German and Austrian refugee musicians interned under the emergency regulations which came into force on the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939. In January 1940 she accepted a position under a scheme funded by the Pilgrim Trust, to act as one of six "music travellers". Their brief was to encourage and organise musical activity in rural areas. Holst was assigned to the west of England, a huge area stretching from Oxfordshire to Cornwall. After the formation by the government of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, responsibilty for the music travellers eventually passed to that body.

No transport or secretarial services were provided by CEMA; travellers were expected to improvise. In these circumstances, according to her friend Ursula Vaughan Williams, Holst's organisational talents "developed brilliantly". Holst has left a detailed account of the varied experiences of her travelling years, which included conducting local brass bands, leading hymn-singing practice ("fourteen very old women in hats sitting round the edge of a dark, empty hideous tin hut with the rain beating on the roof"), sing-songs for evacuee children, concerts and performances by professional groups, and what she termed "drop-in-and-sing" festivals. One concert took place during the Dunkirk evacuation of May-June 1940: "Our leading viola's only son was among the thousands waiting on the other side of the channel, but not for a moment did she allow her attention to wander from the orchestral accompaniments". The work was frequently rewarding; Holst writes of "idyllic days" spent over cups of tea , discussing the hopes and dreams of would-be music makers. Travelling, often by bicycle or on foot, was generally slow and difficult, and the bureaucratic workload imposed by CEMA in the form of documentation and committee meetings became increasingly arduous. As a result, Holst's compositional activity was severely curtailed. She wrote two recorder trios–the Offley and Deddington suites, and made numerous arrangements for female voices of carols and traditional songs. By the summer of 1942 the workload was such that Holst was exhausted, and in need of a lengthy recuperation.

Dartington

The main hall at Dartington

In 1938, Holst had visited Dartington Hall, a progressive school and crafts community near Totnes in Devon, which had been founded in 1925 by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. In 1941–42, when her CEMA work took her to Devon and Cornwall, she was invited by the Elmhirsts to make her base at Dartington. In the summer of 1942, on an extended rest from her duties she was encouraged by Christopher Hall, the centre's administrator, to resign her CEMA role and begin working at Dartington. Martin asked her if she thought it was feasible to "start at Dartington the sort of thing that your father did in the old days at Morley College", a reference to Gustav Holst's work before the First World War among amateur music enthusiasts in London.

Martin's suggestion led to the establishment at Dartington, from 1943, of a one-year music course. This was initially intended to train young women who would encourage the musical life of rural communities through the establishment of amateur orchestras and choirs, but gradually the course was developed to provide a more general musical education. It soon became the hub of a much wider range of activities, including well-attended open evenings in which anyone could participate, and the foundation of an amateur orchestra: "Hardly any of us could play ... However bad we were, we went on". Holst's individualistic teaching methods, heavily based on "learning by doing" and without formal examinations, at first disconcerted her students and puzzled the school inspectors, but eventually gained acceptance and respect. Rosamond Strode, a pupil at Dartington who later became Holst's assistant at Aldeburgh, said of Holst's approach: "She new exactly how, and when, to push her victims in at the deep end, and she knew, also, that although they would flounder and splash about at first, it wouldn't be long before&nbsp...they would be swimming easily while she beamed approval from the bank".

Another aspect of Holst's life at Dartington was that in the conducive atmosphere she was able to resume serious composition, largely abandoned during the hectic CEMA years. In 1943 she completed the Seranade for flute, viola and bassoon, the Suite for String Orchestra, and a choral work, Three Psalms, all of which were performed at a Wigmore Hall concert on 14 June 1943 entirely devoted to her work. In the next few years her compositions included Theme and Variations for solo violin, String Trio No. 1 (premiered by the Dartington Hall String Trio at the National Gallery on 17 July 1944), songs from the 16th-century anthology Tottel's Miscellany, the puppet opera Young Beichan an oboe concerto and a string quartet. At Dartington, Holst began what was to become the most important musical and personal relationship of her mature life—that with Benjamin Britten. The composer and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, visited Dartington in October 1943, where they gave a recital that included Britten's Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo. This was followed by several similar visits. Holst and Britten shared a love of neglected music from the renaissance and baroque eras, and a mutual respect and friendship developed.

In 1945 Holst confided to Leonard Elmhirst that she wished to break away from teaching and amateur music-making: "There is so much more music still to explore". While maintaining her commitment to Dartington, she began to carry out musical tasks for Britten, and to engage in other activities, including a study of Gustav Holst's music that would complement her 1938 biography. She was instrumental, in 1947, in the establishment of the Amadeus Quartet, after the refugee violinist Norbert Brainin had made several appearances at Dartington and confided to Holst his intention to form his own quartet. At Holst's instigation the new group made its debut at Dartington on 13 July 1947, as the "Brainin Quartet", and first appeared as the Amadeus Quartet six months later, at the Wigmore Hall. They continued to visit Dartington regularly, for concerts and informal sessions.

In the postwar period, with the music course now well established and standards of performance having risen markedly at Dartington, Holst organised more complex and challenging performances. The most ambitious of these was Bach's Mass in B minor, to be performed on the 300th anniversary of Bach's death in 1650. Three years in preparation, this endeavour brought a tribute from Father Ernest, a Benedictine monk who was present at the performance: "I don't know, and can't imagine what the music of heaven is like. But when we all get there, please God, if any conducting is still necessary I hope your services will be required and that I will be in the chorus".

Aldeburgh

Assistant to Britten

In July 1951 she resumed her freelance career, and in the autumn of 1952 the composer Benjamin Britten asked her to come to Aldeburgh, Suffolk, to help with his opera Gloriana. She had first met him and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, in the 1940s and they became close friends. She lived in Aldeburgh (in a house designed by architect, H. T. Cadbury-Brown) for the rest of her life, initially working closely with Britten both as his music assistant and for the Aldeburgh Festival, of which she was an artistic director from 1956 to 1977.

In 1953 she arranged for string orchestra William Byrd's keyboard setting of an old Irish tune, Sellinger's Round. This became the basis of the Variations on an Elizabethan Theme, jointly composed by Britten, Lennox Berkeley, Arthur Oldham, Michael Tippett and William Walton. The work was premiered at the 1953 Aldeburgh Festival, in honour of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1964 Imogen Holst stopped working as Britten's assistant to concentrate on recording and editing the music of her father. With composer Colin Matthews she edited scholarly editions of her father's works (including four volumes of facsimiles) and compiled A Thematic Catalogue of Gustav Holst's Music (1974).

Purcell Singers

During her early months in Aldeburgh Holst often spent her weekends in London where in October 1952, at the instigation of Pears, she had formed a small semi-professional choir that would, it was hoped, play a part in future Aldeburgh festivals. Holst began to introduce into this group's repertoire a mixture of ancient and contemporary music—Britten songs and Bach motets—and added works by Monteverdi and Purcell that she had heard at Dartington. The main work that occupied the choir in the winter of 1952–53 was Heinrich Schütz's St Matthew Passion, which was performed at St Margaret's, Westminster on 13 March 1953, with Pears as soloist. The choir did not perform at the 1953 Aldeburgh festival. In December 1953, after a performance at Cecil Sharp House, the choir was formally named "The Purcell Singers", on the suggestion of Vaughan Williams.

For the next 15 years the Purcell Singers were the main focus of Holst's conducting activity. The choir first sang in Aldeburgh at a pre-festival concert on 24 April 1954, at which Holst shared the conducting with Pears. On 19 June 1954 they combined with the Festival Choir in a performance of Bach's St John Passion, with Pears singing the Evangelist and Britten playing the harpsichord continuo. In the following years the Purcell Singers performed and broadcast regularly at Aldeburgh and elsewhere, with a repertoire that Holst gradually expanded, especially in the field of Renaissance and Baroque music which she prepared and edited for performance by the choir. She mixed this fare with a selection of twentieth century works. The New Statesman's review of an April 1956 concert referred to the choir's "outstanding" performance of music by Britten, Monteverdi, and a selection of European madrigals. In 1957 the choir acquired an agent—Basil Douglas, formerly general manager of the English Opera Group—and raised its profile with appearances at significant musical events. These included the Diamond Jubilee concert of the Folk-song Society at Cecil Sharp House in May 1958, a celebration of the tercentenary of music publishing by the Oxford University Press in October 1959, and a Vaughan Williams memorial concert also at Cecil Sharp House, in December 1961.

Several singers who later achieved distinction on the stage or in the concert hall sang with the Purcell Singers early in their careers: the bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk, the tenors Robert Tear and Philip Langridge, and the founder and conductor of the Heinrich Schütz Choir, Roger Norrington. Langridge remembered with particular pleasure a performance in Orford church of Thomas Tallis's forty-part motet Spem in alium, on 2 July 1963. Also in 1963, with Holst's support and encouragement Grayston Burgess, one of the Purcell Singers countertenors, formed a six-voice offshoot, the Purcell Consort, for which she wrote a vocal piece, As Laurel Leaves that Cease not to be Green. In April 1966, Holst's friend Ursula Vaughan Williams wrote in the journal of the Performing Rights Society that the Purcell Singers were one of Holst's "contributions to the art of living, and there must be many people all over England ...who owe to her a new dimension in their lives". In December 1965 Holst recorded a number of her father's vocal and choral works with the Purcell Singers and the English Chamber Orchestra, initially issued under the Argo label.

In 1967 Holst decided to give her conductorship of the Purcell Singers, specifically to have more time for composing, editing and writing. The choir's musical mission, in particular its commitment to early music, was assumed by other groups, such as Norrington's Schütz Choir, and Burgess's Purcell Consort. Holst continued to support these efforts from a distance; for the Consort's tenth anniversary, she composed a setting of William Cleland's "Hallo, My Fancy", which was performed at the Wigmore Hall on 21 May 1973.

Artistic director

Imogen Holst was artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1956 to 1977.

Final years

Holst was appointed a fellow of the RCM in 1966, an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in 1970 and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1975. She received honorary doctorates from the universities of Essex (1968), Exeter (1969), and Leeds (1983).

She died in March 1984, aged 76, and is buried in the churchyard of Saint Peter and Saint Paul's Church in Aldeburgh. Her grave can be found directly behind those of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. She never married.

See also

• List of compositions by Imogen Holst

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

• Carpenter, Humphrey (1992). Benjamin Britten: A biography. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-14324-5.
• Cox, Peter; Dobbs, Jack (1988). Imogen Holst at Dartington. Dartington: Dartington Press. ISBN 0-902386-13-1.
• Gibbs, Alan (2000). "Chapter II: Jane Joseph". Holst Among Friends. London: Thames Publishing. ISBN 978-0905-21059-9.
• Grogan, Christopher; Strode, Rosamund (2010). "Part I: 1907–31". Imogen Holst: A Life in Music (revised ed.). Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84383-599-8.
• Grogan, Christopher; Strode, Rosamund (2010). "Part II: 1931–52". Imogen Holst: A Life in Music (revised ed.). Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84383-599-8.
• Grogan, Christopher (2010). "Part III: 1952–54". Imogen Holst: A Life in Music (revised ed.). Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84383-599-8.
• Grogan, Christopher (2010). "Part IV: 1955–84". Imogen Holst: A Life in Music (revised ed.). Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84383-599-8.
• Tinker, Christopher (2010). "Part V: The Music of Imogen Holst". Imogen Holst: A Life in Music (revised ed.). Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84383-599-8.
• Tinker, Christopher; Strode, Rosamund (2010). "Chronological list of works". Imogen Holst: A Life in Music (revised ed.). Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84383-599-8.
• Holst, Imogen (1969). Gustav Holst (second ed.). London and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-315417-X.
• Wake-Walker, Jenni (compiler) (1997). Time and Concord: Aldeburgh Festival Recollections. Saxmundham, Suffolk: Autograph Books. ISBN 978-0952-32651-9.

External links

• Photos of Imogen Holst's grave
• Imogen Holst: A Life in Music edited by Christopher Grogan (The Boydell Press 2007) includes her diary of her years working with Benjamin Britten, a biographical essay by Rosamund Strode and an analysis of her music by Christopher Tinker.