Imogen Clare Holst (; 12 April 1907 – 9 March 1984) was a British composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, musicologist and festival administrator. The only child of the composer Gustav Holst, she is particularly known for her educational work at Dartington Hall in the 1940s, and for her 20 years as joint artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. In addition to composing music, she wrote composer biographies, much educational material and several books on the life and works of her father.
From a young age Holst showed precocious talent in composing and performance. After attending Eothen School and St Paul's Girls' School, she entered the Royal College of Music, where she developed her skills as a conductor and won several prizes for composing. Unable to follow her initial ambitions to be a pianist or a dancer for health reasons, Holst spent most of the 1930s teaching, and as a full-time organiser for the English Folk Dance and Song Society. These duties reduced her compositional activities, although she made many arrangements of folksongs. After serving as an organiser for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts at the start of the Second World War, in 1942 she began working at Dartington. In her nine years there she established Dartington as a major centre of music education and activity.
In the early 1950s Holst became Benjamin Britten's musical assistant, moved to Aldeburgh, and began helping with the organisation of the annual Aldeburgh Festival. In 1956 she became joint artistic director of the festival, and during the following 20 years helped it to a position of pre-eminence in British musical life. In 1964 she gave up her work as Britten's assistant to resume her own compositional career and to concentrate on the preservation of her father's musical legacy. Her own music is not widely known and has received little critical attention; much of it is unpublished and unperformed. The first recordings dedicated to her works, issued in 2009 and 2012, were warmly received by critics. She was appointed CBE in 1975 and received numerous academic honours. She died at Aldeburgh and is buried in the churchyard there.
Background
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. 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. 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.
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. From 1907 he acted as director of music at Morley College, an adult education centre in the Waterloo district of London. 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.
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 prominent nose inherited from her mother. 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.
In 1917 Imogen began boarding at Eothen, a small, private school for girls in Caterham which later merged to form Caterham School. It was there that Jane Joseph, Gustav's star pupil from SPGS, taught music. A letter home, dated 17 July 1917, tells of "compertishions, and ripping prizes, and strawberries and cream for tea". 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. 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.
Imogen left Eothen in December 1920 hoping to study under Ruby Ginner at the Ginner-Mawer School of Dance and Drama, 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.
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". 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. Among other activities she became interested in folk music and dance, and in 1923 became a member of the English Folk Dance Society (EFDS). 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.
Royal College of Music
Although destined like her father for the RCM, Holst first spent a year studying composition with Herbert Howells, piano with Adine O'Neill and the French horn with Adolph Borsdorf, while participating in the EFDS summer schools and other musical activities. In July 1926 she arranged and conducted the music for an EFDS pageant, held at Thaxted as a fund-raiser towards the building of the society's new headquarters at Regent's Park. Holst began at the RCM in September 1926, studying piano with Kathleen Long, composition with George Dyson, and conducting under W. H. Reed. Her aptitude as a conductor was evident 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 speculate that Holst might eventually become the first woman to "establish a secure tenure of the conductor's platform".
In her second RCM year Holst concentrated on composition, producing several chamber works including 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. 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" which promoted international understanding through music and dance. In October 1928 she won the RCM's Cobbett prize for an original chamber composition, 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 for her, the achievement was overshadowed by the news that month of the premature death at 34 of her early mentor Jane Joseph.
In the winter of 1929 Holst made her first visit to Canada and the United States, as part of an EFDS party. Back home, she worked on her RCM finals composition, a suite for brass band entitled The Unfortunate Traveller. Despite some apprehension on her part, the piece passed the examiners' scrutiny and was played at the college's end-of-year concert in July 1930. Before then, in June, Holst learned that she had been awarded an Octavia Travelling Scholarship worth £100, which would enable her to study composition abroad.
Career
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. 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."
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. 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. 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. Although she composed little original music during these years, she made many instrumental and vocal arrangements of traditional folk melodies.
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. 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. In 1936 she paid a visit to Hollywood, where she stayed with her uncle (Gustav's brother), the actor Ernest Cossart. Back in England, Holst worked on recorder arrangements of music by the neglected 17th-century composer Pelham Humphrey. These were published in 1936 to a positive critical reception.
In 1938 Holst published a biography of her father. 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".Edmund Rubbra in Monthly Musical Record, November 1938, quoted in Grogan and Strode Part II, p. 125
War: travelling for CEMA