Remastering the past

Musical Times, Autumn 2001 by Witts, Richard

'Renewal' in recent British music

RICHARD WITTS is worried by a backward tendency among some senior British composers

LAST YEAR the Halle Concerts Society of Manchester gave the world - nay, the cosmos - a new ending to Gustav Holst's eighty-year-old symphonic suite The planets. It commissioned Colin Matthews, composer and Executive Administrator of the Holst Foundation, to add an eighth movement. Entitled Pluto: the renewer,1 Matthews's six-minute finale took its creative impulse from the fact that the farthest planet in our solar system was discovered only in 1930. This took place thirteen years after Holst had completed his ambitious `suite for large orchestra'. Holst might have added a movement for Pluto himself had he not died in 1934, it was implied.

Although Matthews was happy to undertake the commission, he was careful to distance himself, Pluto-like, from this theory of realisation. He knew that Holst, in the four years before his death, had never professed a desire to complete the set. In any case, there are more compelling - musical-- reasons why the suite, as Holst conceived it, stands alone.

For example, the opening and closing movements (`Mars the bringer of war' and `Neptune the mystic') mirror each other by distinctive means: the opening bass pedal on G of 'Mars' is echoed by the high G pedal of Neptune's concluding chorus entry, and both sections are united by the metre of five beats to a bar. 'Neptune' itself presents the most advanced and abstruse harmonies in the suite, mutated from those of 'Mars', and the wordless female chorus retreat with them into aural infinity The suite is therefore rounded-off.

Yet the most obvious reason why it makes no sense to add Pluto is that the work is not at all driven by astronomy, but by astrology The order of the movements -'Mars', 'Venus', 'Mercury', Jupiter', 'Saturn', 'Uranus', 'Neptune' - does not follow their solar sequence (which would put 'Mercury' first), but instead emulates the succession of the relative psychic powers which they 'bring' to us earthlings. At the centre of musical operations stands Holst's human protagonist, upon whom the planet signs cast their supernatural biases.

This Romantic character is hardly a hero in the manner of Mahler's Titan or Wagner's Parsifal (although the chorus of females - at the first performance, schoolgirls - are surely stepsisters of Klingsor's seductive flower maidens). Holst's figurant represents humanity exposed to the occult powers of the unfixed stars as they orbit through the twelve astrological houses of the zodiac. This places the work's conceptual premise at the cross-roads between the late-Romantic (Strauss's wilful Zarathustra, who rose again in the Alpine symphony of 1915) and the neo-classic (Stravinsky's doomed Oedipus), which is where the composition, composed in 1914-16, happens to sit chronologically.2

Holst, by the way, is not the human in question, for he tells us through the cipher of four notes which opens the penultimate section that he is Uranus the musical Magician. He spells himself in the German system as befits his name (the 'von' of which he understandably dropped in World War 1).3 Moreover, Holst's signature is played on the instrument by which he earned his living, the trombone. Idiosyncratic elements like these permeate this singular work, as we shall see.

While each movement comes over as self-- contained in the style of a conventional concert suite, Holst allows the presence of the two closest planet signs, Mars and Venus, to mediate their complementary astrological powers through the others as the work proceeds. He achieves this by giving elemental motifs to `the bringers' of war and peace: Mars is represented by a semitone in the bass register and Venus by a wholetone in the treble.

Even 'Mars' contains within itself a 'shadow' of Venus: the wholetone in the violins which heralds change and which is spelt in the disfigured manner of a diminished third (bars 28-34). 'Venus' is itself conditioned by its adversary near its close when the wholetones ascend to strike 'Mars'-inflected harmonies (bars 126-29). Cryptic notational play of this kind is something one might expect from a composer who called astrology his `pet vice'.4 Indeed, the five-in-a-bar of 'Mars' can be accounted for by the fact that five is the figure astrologically linked to that planet; in the finale of 'Neptune', the metre recurs as a trace of 'Mars'. It also explains the varieties of fives firing 'Jupiter'.

Thus in 'Mercury' (`the youth at puberty, swiftly flashing', according to Aleister Crowley5), selected instrumental pairs are divided equally into the keys of B6 or A. This semitone gap represents an aspect of Mars, and through it the 'Venus'-- toned harmonies sprint along. The tune of the trio (guilelessly stolen from the finale of Stravinsky's Firebird, as Peter Warlock pointed out at the time6) is also linked to `the bringer of peace'. Most striking of all is 'Saturn', where from the very start the wholetones of 'Venus' toll in the woodwind while the semitones of 'Mars' climb and swell menacingly in the double basses. The first half of the movement is coloured sombrely by Mars (bars 1-104), the remainder lit radiantly by the planet of peace.