Imogen Holst

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Imogen Clare Holst (née von Holst; 12 April 1907 to September 1984) was a British composer, arranger, conductor, musician, musicologist, and festival manager.

She is best known for her early career at Dartington Hall in the 1940s and 20 years as joint artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival.

She wrote composer biographies, a lot of educational information, and several books on her father's life and works. Holst demonstrated a natural knack for composing and performing from a young age.

She began studying at Eothen School and St Paul's Girls' School, where she learned her skills as a conductor and received multiple awards for composing.

Holst spent the majority of the 1930s teaching and as a full-time organiser for the English Folk Dance and Song Society, despite being unable to follow her childhood aspirations to be a pianist or a dancer due to health reasons.

Although she made several arrangements of folksongs, these duties reduced her compositional duties.

Dartington began as an organizer for the Council for Music and the Arts at the start of the Second World War in 1942.

Dartington became a central point of music education and development in her nine years as a leader of music education and culture. Holst, Benjamin Britten's musical assistant, migrated to Aldeburgh and began assisting with the organisation of the annual Aldeburgh Festival in the 1950s.

She became joint artistic director of the festival in 1956 and brought it to a place of pre-eminence in British musical life.

She left her career as Britten's assistant in 1964 to return to her own compositional work and to concentrate on the preservation of her father's musical legacy.

Her own music is little known and has received little critical notice; a large portion of it is unpublished and unperformed.

Critics also warmly welcomed the first recordings dedicated to her works, which were released in 2009 and 2012.

She was made a CBE in 1975 and has received many academic awards.

She died in Aldeburgh and is buried in the churchyard.

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Career

Holst spent much of the time between September 1930 and May 1931 travelling. In September, a whizzling visit to Liège for the International Society of Contemporary Music Congress was followed quickly by a three-month round tour to Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, and Hungary, returning to England via Prague, Dresden, Berlin, and Amsterdam. A Mozart pilgrimage in Salzburg, performances of Der Rosenkavalier and Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Vienna State Opera, Bach in Berlin, and Mahler's Seventh Symphony in Amsterdam included Mozart's Seventh Symphony. She left England again on February 1st, this time for Italy. Holst returned home with mixed feelings about Italian music-making following two months. "The Italians are a nation of singers," she said. However, music in that region is a different world. "If it is music one is looking for, there is no place like London," she said back in London.

Holst wanted a job, and she took over music at the Citizen House arts and education center in Bath in June 1931. She despised the discipline levied by an unsympathetic and unyielding boss, but she did not stay until the end of the year, when Citizen House had been relocated to Hampstead by that time. She served briefly as a freelance conductor and accompanist before joining the EFDS staff in 1932. The group had widened to become the "English Folk Dance and Song Society" (EFDSS) by now, and it was based in Cecil Sharp House, the organization's new headquarters. The teaching positions, mainly teaching, were not full-time, and she was able to work part-time at her old school, Eothen, and Roedean School. Although she made no original music during those years, she made several instrumental and vocal arrangements of traditional folk melodies.

Gustav Holst's health had been bad for years; it deteriorated in the winter of 1933-1934, and he died on May 25, 1934. Imogen Holst has been secretly determined that she will establish and protect her father's musical legacy. She appeared in a Gustav Holst memorial concert on March 24, 1935, in which she conducted her own arrangement of one of her father's brass band suites. Meanwhile, her own music was starting to gain attention. "Nowell and Nowell" was a 1934 Christmas carol concert in Chichester Cathedral, and Elsie Avril was the soloist in her first Concerto for Violin and Strings. In 1936, she paid a visit to Hollywood, where she stayed with her uncle (Gustav's uncle), actor Ernest Cossart. Holst, a recovering 16th-century composer from England, worked on recorder arrangements of music by the neglected 16th-century composer Pelham Humphrey. They were released in 1936 to a largely critical audience.

Holst published a biography of her father in 1938. Edmund Rubbra praised her for releasing a book that was not "clouded by emotion" despite many positive feedback from friends and critics; her biography is both personal and objective."

Holst left amateur music-making and teaching in 1938 in order to concentrate on her own personal growth. She resigned from her EFDSS role while still honoring the company's existing obligations. She had quit Roedean in 1936, but she resigned from Eothen in Easter 1939. In June 1939, she began a tour of Switzerland, which included the Lucerne Festival. As war became more apparent in August, she took a break from the trip and returned home.

Holst worked with the Bloomsbury House Refugee Committee, which helped German and Austrian refugees interned under emergency rules following the outbreak of war on September 3rd. She accepted a role as one of six "music travelers" in January 1940, with the aim of raising morale by encouraging musical participation in rural communities. Holst was sent to cover the west of England, which includes everything from Oxfordshire to Cornwall. When the government introduced the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the music visitors' responsibility was transferred to the institution.

According to Ursula Vaughan Williams, Holst's organisational skills flourished "with no concrete assistance from CEMA." Holst's own account, she performed local brass bands and Women's Institute choirs ("fourteen very old women in hats sat around the edge of a dark, empty hideous hut"), as well as arranging sing-songs for evacuee children. She arranged performances by professional organizations and "drop-in-and-sing" festivals in which anyone could participate. She described "idyllic days" after over cups of tea, exploring the aspirations and aspirations of aspiring music makers. Her compositional output in those years was limited due to time and demands of work, but she did create two recorder trios, the Offley and Deddington suites, and produced numerous arrangements for female voices of carols and traditional songs.

Holst had visited Dartington Hall, a progressive school and craft community near Totnes in Devon, which had been established in 1925 by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. While traveling for CEMA in Devon and Cornwall, the Elmhirsts invited her to base at Dartington in 1941-42. She was begged by Christopher Martin, the centre's chief, to resign her CEMA position and work at Dartington in the summer of 1942. He had in mind a music degree, "the sort of thing your father did in the old days at Morley College." Holst began in 1943 with a one-year course that was initially designed to prepare young women to organise amateur orchestras and musical events in rural settings. Gradually, it transformed into a more general musical education for a broader student population. The course soared under Holst's leadership, and it became the hub of a variety of musical endeavors, including the establishment of an amateur orchestra: "Hardly any of us could play... However bad we were, we carried on. Holst's teaching methods, which are largely based on "learning by doing" and without formal exams, at first disconcerted her students and baffled the school inspectors, but eventually gained recognition and admiration. Rosamond Strode, a Dartington student who later worked with Holst at Aldeburgh, spoke out about her plan: "She knew exactly how and when to pull her victims into the deep end, but she knew that even though they would flounder and splash about at first, they would not be able to swim at all."

Dartington Holst's favourable atmosphere revived solid composition, which was largely abandoned during the tumultuous CEMA years. Serenade for flute, viola, and bassoon, a String Orchestra Suite, and a Choral work, Three Psalms, were completed in 1943. All these performances were performed at a Wigmore Hall concert on June 14, 1943, when she was dedicated to her music. Theme and Variations for solo violin, String Trio No. 2, were among other Dartington compositions from the 1980s. 1 (premiered by the Dartington Hall String Trio at the National Gallery on July 17, 1944) performed songs from Tottel's Miscellany, an oboe concerto, and a string quartet. Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Pears gave the first of many recitals at Dartington in October 1943. Britten and Holst's mutual admiration and friendship were bolstered by their shared passion for forgotten music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Holst was convinced that Britten would continue and complete the job of her father in redefining the style of English music.

Holst began to expand her musical interests from 1945, despite retaining her commitment to Dartington. She promoted Dartington as the base for Britten's new English Opera Group, as well as editing and preparing scores for Britten, but Glyndebourne was eventually preferred. Norbert Brainin, a refugee violinist, was encouraged to form his own string quartet in 1947 and called it the "Brainin Quartet" on June 13th. The Amadeus Quartet, a six-month-old group, appeared at the Wigmore Hall and went on to international prominence. In 1948, she began working on a critical analysis of her father's music, as a companion volume to her 1938 Gustav Holst biography. Most commentators praised the paper's objectivity when it was first published in 1951, with one commentator claiming that she had been "unnecessarily harsh" in her rulings.

In the open air at Dartington, produced for the 25th wedding anniversary of the company's founders, Holst performed the premiere of British Five Flower Songs part songs on July 23. Holst's increasing success allowed him to assemble performances of more demanding works, such as Bach's Mass in B minor in July 1950 to commemorate Bach's 200th anniversary of death. "I don't know, and can't imagine what heaven's music is like," one of the audience's three years in preparation. Please God, if any serving is still required, I hope your services will be needed and that I will be in the chorus, but not until we get there.

Holst's career focus was shifting by the middle of 1950. She appeared at the first two Aldeburgh Festivals in 1948 and 1949, and she was given a commission to produce a choral piece for performance at the 1951 festival; welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow were among the chores; Sensing that she had a year to leave Dartington, she gave a year's notice, part of which was spent on sabbatical, studying Indian music at Rabindranath Tagore's university in West Bengal. Ten Indian Folk Tunes for recorder was a result of her trip to London. Benedick and Beatrice, her one-act opera, was performed at Dartington on July 21, 1951, marking her departure.

Dartington, Holst toured Europe, gathering music that she would later edit for show, including madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo, which she found "very exciting." She worked with him on several projects, including a new staging version of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and the writing of the vocal and complete scores for Britten's opera Billy Budd. Pears, who had attended Holst's overall contributions to musical life, believed she could assist Britten and the Aldeburgh Festival on a more formal basis, and she was invited to join him immediately after the 1952 festival. She agreed and moved to Aldeburgh, Aldeburgh.

Holst's financial arrangement was vague; she was paid on a piecemeal basis rather than a regular salary, unaware that she had fought for her father's inheritance to her mother and had no funds of her own. As a result, she lived in Aldeburgh very cheaply, but her dedication to Britten outweighed her own physical fitness. Her life revolved around the joint aim of assisting Britten and establishing the Aldeburgh Festival for the next dozen years. She performed many choral and vocal arrangements, promoted her father's music, and wrote books, articles, and program notes as a result of her study.

Holst maintained a diary for the first 18 months of her Britten service, which Grogan says, gives her "unconditional confidence in Britten's success and success, as well as her devoted service to his work." The opera Gloriana, the first of Britten's works to which she made a major contribution, was scheduled to premiere in 1953. The opera's short timeframe put a strain on the composer and his new assistant, who were dramatized 60 years later in a radio play, Imo and Ben. Holst's main task with Gloriana was to copy Britten's pencil drawings and assemble the vocal and piano scores, which the singers needed for rehearsals by February 1953. She continued to assist him with the writing of the complete orchestral score and gave similar performances with his next opera, The Turn of the Screw (1954). Holst joined him in Switzerland when he finished the job, when Britain was under pressure during the design of his ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1956). Noye's Fludde (1957), in which she taught Britten how to get a special raindrop effect by striking a row of china mugs with a wooden spoon, brought her great joy. In a series published by Boosey and Hawkes (1954-1959), she and Britten collaborated to collect and publish music for the recorder, as well as jointly authored a famous introductory book, The Story of Music (1958).

Holst continued to assist Britten with all of his major compositions until 1964, when she decided to prioritize her father's musical career, re-establish her career as a composer, and pursue a more independent path. She relinquished her position as Britten's assistant while still being committed to Britten. She did not leave Aldeburgh and continued her Aldeburgh Festival work.

When Holst joined Britain and Pears as one of the festival's artistic directors, she assumed responsibility for programming and performers. She arranged a performance of Gustav Holst's opera Savitri, the first of many Gustav Holst works she introduced to the festival in the ensuing years. Savitri was included in a double bill including Imogen's translation of John Blow's 17th century opera Venus and Adonis. In 1957, she founded late-night concerts, and in 1962 she produced a series dedicated to Flemish music, in which she had recently become interested. For her appearance at Aldeburgh parish church, she has also developed frequent schedules of church music. Holst had lived in a string of lodgings and rented apartments since moving to Aldeburgh in 1952. She moved to a tiny modern bungalow in Church Walk, where she lived for the remainder of her life. The house was constructed on the edge of the site where it had been hoped to build a Festival Theatre. The bungalow was nonetheless designed by architect H. T. Cadbury-Brown, who allowed Holst to live there rent-free, even though it was postponed in favour of a move to Snape Maltings.

Holst returned to composition in 1964, and the Trianon Suite, a cantata for female voices composed for the Trianon Youth Orchestra of Ipswich, received commissions in 1965. She wrote two books, as well as a bibliography of Bach and Britten in 1965 and 1966. By failing to mention the contributions to Britten's rise in fame in recent years, such as former librettists Eric Crozier and Ronald Duncan, created some surprise and surprise. Holst performed a number of her father's recordings with the Purcell Singers and the English Chamber Orchestra between 1966 and 1970, as well as the Argo and Lyrita brands. The Double Violin Concerto was one of these recordings, which she performed with Emanuel Hurwitz as soloist. She had appeared as the rehearsal pianist before the first performance.

Holst founded the Purcell Singers, a small semi-professional choir formed in October 1952, largely at Pears' instigation. The choir performed regularly at the Aldeburgh Festival from 1954 to twentieth-century works, with programs ranging from rarely heard medieval music to twentieth-century masterpieces. The bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk, Robert Tear and Philip Langridge, as well as Roger Norrington, the choir's founder and conductor, were among choir members who later achieved individual excellence. Langridge recalled a performance in Thomas Tallis' forty-part motet Spem in alium on July 2nd, 1963. When she resigned as the choir's conductor in 1967, much of the choir's musical mission, especially its dedication to early music, was assumed by other groups, such as Norrington's Schütz Choir and the Purcell Consort, which was founded by ex-Purcell Singers chorister Grayston Burgess.

Holst appeared alongside Britten in the concert that opened the Aldeburgh Festival's new home at the Snape Maltings on June 2nd, 1967. Holst was involved in the construction of educational classes at the Maltings, which began with weekend singing lessons and then developed to the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies, which also had its own training orchestra. Imogen's appearances at the festival had become more popular by this time, but she gave a concert of Gustav Holst's brass band music in 1975, which was held outside Framlingham Castle. According to a report of the soirée, it was described as an evening of "persistent rain" until a diminutive figure in a special scarlet dress took the conductor's baton. The band was redesigned, and Holst's Suite was played as it had never been played before.

Since heart surgery in 1973, the Britten had been in poor health, and he died on December 4, 1976. Holst was uncertain that she would have a working relationship with Pears alone, and she decided against retiring as an artistic director after this year's festival. She appeared in for the incapacitate conductor André Previn at the Snape Maltings Training Orchestra's inaugural festival concert as a performer for her final festival appearance as a performer. On retirement, she accepted the honorary title of Artistic Director Emeritus.

Later career

Gustav Holst's centennial was commemorated in 1974, when Imogen released a Thematic Catalogue of Gustav Holst's Music and opened the Holst Birthplace Museum in Cheltenham. Imogen worked with the composer Colin Matthews on the centennial year for the first volume of a facsimile edition of Gustav Holst's manuscripts. In the years up to 1983, three more facsimile volumes were produced, at which time the project was much more expensive, and Imogen's declining health resulted in the project's cancellation. She negotiated the appearances of Savitri and The Wandering Scholar at Aldeburgh and Sadler's Wells, as well as assisting in the development of Gustav Holst's life and work at Aldeburgh and the Royal Festival Hall as part of the 1974 centennial.

Holst continued to write about other aspects of music, apart from her books concerned with her father's life and work. She also published a short biography of Renaissance composer William Byrd (1972) and a handbook for conductors of amateur choirs (1973). She continued to compose, mainly short pieces, but with occasional larger-scale orchestral projects such as the Woodbridge Suite (1970) and the Deben Calendar (1977), the latter a series of twelve sketches depicting the River Deben in Suffolk at various times of the year. String Quintet, written in 1982 and performed by the Endellion Quartet in October of that year, was augmented by cellist Steven Isserlis.

In April 1979, Holst was present when the Queen Mother opened the new Britten-Pears School building in Snape. Holst Library, a new library that Holst donated a substantial amount of books, including books that her father had used in his own teaching career. She had hoped that her retirement from the Aldeburgh Festival would be complete after 1977, but Pears made an exception in 1980 when she staged a 70th birthday celebration concert.

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