Early life and family

Imogen Holst was born on 12 April 1907 at 31 Grena Road, Richmond, a riverside town to the west of London.^[2] Her parents were Gustav Theodore Holst, an aspiring composer then working as a music teacher, and Isobel, née Harrison. The Holst family, of mixed Swedish, German and Latvian ancestry, had been in England since 1802 and had been musicians for several generations.^{[n 1]} Gustav followed this family tradition; while studying at the Royal College of Music (RCM), he met Isobel Harrison, who sang in one of the amateur choirs that he conducted. He was immediately attracted to her, and they were married on 22 July 1901.^[4]

While attempting to establish himself as a composer, Gustav Holst worked first as an orchestral trombonist, and later as a teacher. In 1907 he held teaching posts at James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich, and St Paul's Girls' School (SPGS) in Hammersmith, where he was director of music.^[5] From 1907 he acted as director of music at Morley College, an adult education centre in the Waterloo district of London.^[6][7] When Imogen was still very small the family moved from Richmond to a small house by the river in nearby Barnes, which they rented from a relative. 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.^[8]

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.^[8] In 1912, at the age of five, she joined the kindergarten class at the Froebel Institute, and remained at the school for five years. Summers were often spent at the Holsts' rented country cottage at Thaxted in Essex, where Gustav Holst began an annual Whitsun Festival in 1916.^[9]

In 1917 Imogen began boarding at Eothen, a small, private school for girls in Caterham, where Jane Joseph, Gustav's star pupil from SPGS, taught music.^[10] A letter home, dated 17 July 1917, tells of "compertishions [sic], and ripping prizes, and strawberries and cream for tea".^[11] At the school, 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—two instrumental pieces and four Christmas carol tunes—which she numbered as Ops. 1, 2, and 3.^[12][13] In the summer term of 1920, she composed and choreographed a "Dance of the Nymphs and Shepherds", which was performed at the school under her direction on 9 July.^{[14][n 2]}

Imogen left Eothen in December 1920 hoping to study under Ruby Ginner at the Ginner-Mawer School of Dance and Drama,^{[n 3]} but was rejected on health grounds, although there appeared to be no significant medical issue. She then studied at home under a governess, while waiting to start at St Paul's Girls School in the autumn. At Whitsun 1921 she took part as a dancer in her father's production of Purcell's semi-opera from 1690, Masque of Dioclesian, held in the St Paul's School grounds and repeated a week later in Hyde Park.^[16]

In September 1921 Imogen began at St Paul's Girls School, and became a boarder from Spring 1922. In July 1922 she performed a Bach Prelude and Fugue on the piano, for which Joseph praised her warmly, writing: "I think everyone enjoyed the Bach from beginning to end, they all made nice contented noises at the end of it".^[17] Imogen's SPGS years were generally happy and successful. In July 1923 she won the junior Alice Lupton piano prize, but her chances of distinction as a pianist were marred when she began to develop phlebitis in her left arm.^{[18][n 4]} Among other activities she became interested in folk music and dance, and in 1923 became a member of the English Folk Dance Society (EFDS).^[18] In 1924–25, her final year at SPGS, Imogen founded a folk dance society in the school. At an end-of-term school concert late in July 1925, she played Chopin's étude in E major and gave the first performance of Gustav Holst's Toccata.^[20]

European travels, 1930–31

Holst spent much of the period between September 1930 and May 1931 travelling. A hectic visit to Liège in September, for the International Society of Contemporary Music Congress, was followed immediately by a three-month round trip, to Scandinavia, Germany, Austria and Hungary, returning to England via Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin and Amsterdam. Her musical experiences included 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.^[34] On 1 February 1932 she left England again, this time for Italy. After a two-month tour Holst came home with mixed views on Italian music-making. She concluded that "the Italians are a nation of singers ... But music is a different language in that part of the world". Back in London, she decided that despite her experiences, "if it is music one is wanting, there is no place like London."^[35][36]

Mainly teaching, 1931–38

With her scholarship funds exhausted, Holst needed a job, and in June 1931 took charge of music at the Citizen House arts and education centre in Bath. She disliked the disciplines imposed by an unsympathetic and unyielding superior, but stayed until the end of the year, by which time Citizen House had relocated to Hampstead.^[37] She worked briefly as a freelance conductor and accompanist before joining the staff of the EFDS early in 1932. The organisation had by now expanded to become the "English Folk Dance and Song Society" (EFDSS) and was based in new headquarters at Cecil Sharp House.^{[n 6]} The duties, mainly teaching, were not full-time, and she was able to take up part-time teaching posts at her old school, Eothen, and at Roedean School.^[40] Although she composed little original music during these years, she made many instrumental and vocal arrangements of traditional folk melodies.^[41]

Gustav Holst's health had been poor for years; in the winter of 1933–34 it deteriorated, and he died on 25 May 1934. Imogen Holst privately determined that she would establish and protect her father's musical legacy.^[42] On 24 March 1935 she took part in a Gustav Holst memorial concert, in which she conducted her own arrangement of one of her father's brass band suites. Meanwhile, her own music was beginning to attract attention. Her carol arrangement "Nowell and Nowell" was performed in a 1934 Christmas concert in Chichester Cathedral, and the following year saw the premiere of her Concerto for Violin and Strings, with Elsie Avril as the soloist.^[42] In 1936 she paid a visit to Hollywood, where she stayed with her uncle (Gustav's brother), the actor Ernest Cossart.^[43] Back in England, Holst worked on recorder arrangements of music by the neglected 16th-century composer Pelham Humphrey. These were published in 1936 to a positive critical reception.^[44]

In 1938 Holst published a biography of her father.^[44] Among many positive comments from friends and critics, the composer Edmund Rubbra praised her for producing a book that was not "clouded by sentiment ... her biography is at once intimate and objective".^[45]

War: travelling for CEMA

In 1938 Holst decided to abandon amateur music-making and teaching to concentrate on her own professional development. She resigned her EFDSS post while continuing to honour existing commitments to the organisation. She had given up her work at Roedean in 1936;^[42] at Easter 1939 she resigned from Eothen. In June 1939 she began a tour of Switzerland which included the Lucerne Festival. Towards the end of August, as war became increasingly likely, she broke off the trip and returned home.^[46]

After the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939, Holst worked for the Bloomsbury House Refugee Committee, which supported German and Austrian refugee musicians interned under emergency regulations. In January 1940 she accepted a position under a scheme organised by the Pilgrim Trust, to act as one of six "music travellers", whose brief was to boost morale by encouraging musical activities in rural communities. Holst was assigned to cover the west of England, a huge area stretching from Oxfordshire to Cornwall. When the government set up the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), responsibility for the music travellers passed to that body.^{[46][n 7]}

With little practical support from CEMA, Holst's organisational talents, according to her friend Ursula Vaughan Williams, "developed brilliantly".^[19] According to Holst's own account, her duties included conducting local brass bands and Women's Institute choirs ("fourteen very old women in hats sitting round the edge of a dark, empty hideous tin hut"), and organising sing-songs for evacuee children. She arranged performances by professional groups, and what she termed "drop-in-and-sing" festivals in which anyone could join. She wrote of "idyllic days" spent over cups of tea, discussing the hopes and dreams of would-be music makers.^[48] Her compositional activity in these years was limited by time and pressures of work, but she produced two recorder trios—the Offley and Deddington suites—and made numerous arrangements for female voices of carols and traditional songs.^[49][50]

Dartington

In 1938, Holst had visited Dartington Hall,^[50] a progressive school and crafts community near Totnes in Devon, which had been founded in 1925 by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst.^[51] In 1941–42, while travelling for CEMA in Devon and Cornwall, she was invited by the Elmhirsts to make her base at Dartington.^[50] In the summer of 1942 she was persuaded by Christopher Martin, the centre's administrator, to resign her CEMA role and work at Dartington. He had in mind a music course, "the sort of thing that your father did in the old days at Morley College".^[52] Beginning in 1943, Holst established a one-year course, initially designed to train young women to organise amateur orchestras and musical events in rural communities. Gradually it developed into a more general musical education for a broader student intake. Under Holst's leadership the course quickly became the hub of a range of musical activities, including the foundation of an amateur orchestra: "Hardly any of us could play ... However bad we were, we went on".^[53] Holst's 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.^[54] Rosamond Strode, a pupil at Dartington who later worked with Holst at Aldeburgh, said of her approach: "She knew 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 ... they would be swimming easily while she beamed approval from the bank".^[55]

In the conducive atmosphere of Dartington Holst resumed serious composition, largely abandoned during the hectic CEMA years. In 1943 she completed a Serenade for flute, viola and bassoon, a Suite for String Orchestra, and a choral work, Three Psalms. All these works were performed at a Wigmore Hall concert on 14 June 1943 devoted to her music. Other compositions from the Dartington years 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, an oboe concerto, and a string quartet.^[56][57] In October 1943 the composer Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Pears gave the first of several recitals at Dartington. A mutual respect and friendship developed between Britten and Holst, strengthened by their shared love of neglected music from the Renaissance and Baroque eras. Holst was convinced that Britten was the composer to continue and complete the work of her father in redefining the character of English music.^[58]

From 1945, while maintaining her commitment to Dartington, Holst began to widen her musical activities. As well as editing and preparing scores for Britten, she promoted Dartington as the base for Britten's new English Opera Group, although eventually Glyndebourne was preferred.^[59] In 1947 she encouraged the refugee violinist Norbert Brainin to form his own string quartet,^[60] and arranged its debut at Dartington, as the "Brainin Quartet", on 13 July 1947. Six months later, renamed the Amadeus Quartet, the group appeared at the Wigmore Hall, and went on to worldwide recognition.^[61] In 1948 she began work on a critical study of her father's music, a companion volume to her 1938 Gustav Holst biography.^[62] When this was published in 1951, most critics praised its objectivity, one critic venturing that she had been "unnecessarily harsh" in her judgements.^[63]

On 23 July 1950 Holst conducted the premiere of Britten's Five Flower Songs part songs in the open air at Dartington, composed for the 25th wedding anniversary of its owners.^[64] Rising standards of achievement at Dartington enabled Holst to organise performances of more demanding works, such as Bach's Mass in B minor in July 1950 to honour the 200th anniversary of Bach's death. Three years in preparation, this endeavour brought a tribute from one of the audience: "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".^[60]

By the middle of 1950 Holst's professional focus was changing. She had attended the first two Aldeburgh Festivals in 1948 and 1949, and in 1950 accepted a commission to provide a choral work for performance at the 1951 festival; The work was the song cycle for female voices and harp, Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow.^[65][65] Sensing that it was time 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.^[66] A fruit of this visit was her Ten Indian Folk Tunes for recorder.^[67] On 21 July 1951 her one-act opera, Benedick and Beatrice, was performed at Dartington, to mark her departure.^[63]

Aldeburgh

Without definite plans for her future after Dartington, Holst toured Europe, collecting music that she would later edit for performance, including madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo which she found "very exciting".^[68] At home, although not formally employed by Britten, she worked with him on several projects, including a new performing version of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, ^[69] and the preparation of the vocal and full scores for Britten's opera Billy Budd.^[63] Pears, who had observed Holst's overall contributions to musical life at Dartington, believed she could help Britten and the Aldeburgh Festival on a more formal basis, and shortly after the 1952 festival Britten invited her to come and work with him. She agreed, and moved to lodgings in Aldeburgh.^[70]

Honours

Holst was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 1966. She was awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Essex (1968), Exeter (1969), and Leeds (1983). She was given honorary membership of the Royal Academy of Music in 1970. Holst was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1975 New Year Honours for services to music.^[125]

List of recordings

• String Quartet No 1. Brindisi String Quartet. Conifer CDCF 196 (1990)
• Phantasy Quartet, Duo for viola and piano, String Trio No. 1, The Fall of the Leaf, Sonata for violin and cello, String Quintet. Court Lane Music CLM37601 (2009)
• Mass in A minor, A Hynme to Christ, Three Psalms, Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow, Hello my fancy. Choir of Clare College, Cambridge. Harmonia Mundi HMU907576 (2012)
• Suite for viola, Rosalind Ventris, Delphian DCD 34293 (2023)