Sunday Classics: What can we say? Composer Gustav Holst performed this foul deed himself!

HOLST and SPRING-RICE: "I vow to thee, my country"


From the Royal British Legion's Festival of Remembrance, Nov. 12, 2011

by Ken

As I indicated in Friday night's preview, in which we saw a technically blah video clip of a pretty decent performance of the "Jupiter" movement of Holst's The Planets, it was slogging through Episode 2 of Series 2 of the new Upstairs Downstairs that set me off on this musical mini-inquiry.

It is, in a word . . . well, the technical term is dreck. It had a reason of sorts for coming into existence when it did, c1921, as Britons tried to rally from the horrors of World War I. But that's an explanation, not excuse. Just by way of reminder, here's where the music came from.

HOLST: The Planets, Op. 32:
iv. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity: central theme


London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. EMI, recorded 1978-79


WHAT'S STARTLING ABOUT THE TRANSFORMATION
OF THIS GLORIOUS MUSIC TO SUCH DRECK . . .

. . . is that the deed was done by the composer himself!

The dreadful poem had been written in 1908 -- thus well before the Great War -- by the British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, who a few years later served as British ambassador to the U.S., in the years leading up to the war. The ambassador is supposed to have heavily lobbied the reluctant President Woodrow Wilson to join in the festivities.

Come the postwar period, composer Gustav Holst was asked to set the poem to music, and for reasons left to history didn't have the sense to say "no." Per Wikipedia:

In 1921 Gustav Holst adapted the music from a section of "Jupiter" from his suite The Planets to create a setting for the poem. The music was extended slightly to fit the final two lines of the first verse. At the request of the publisher Curwen, Holst made a version as a unison song with orchestra (Curwen also published Sir Hubert Parry's unison song with orchestra, "Jerusalem"). This was probably first performed in 1921 and became a common element at Armistice memorial ceremonies, especially after it was published as a hymn in 1926. Holst harmonised the tune to make it usable as a hymn, which was included in Songs of Praise in 1926 with the same words, but the tune was then called "Thaxted" (named after the village where Holst lived for many years). The editor of the new (1926) edition of Songs of Praise was Holst's close friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, which may have provided the stimulus for producing the hymn.

But wait, there's more.

Holst's daughter Imogen recorded that "At the time when he was asked to set these words to music, Holst was so over-worked and over-weary that he felt relieved to discover they 'fitted' the tune from Jupiter."

Ah! So Spring-Rice's bilious words "'fitted' the tune from Jupiter"!


IMOGEN HOLST'S WITNESS PROVIDES US WITH
EXPLANATIONS FOR TWO THINGS, I THINK

(1) Why Holst performed this act of musical butchery. Having committed himself to providing music for Spring-Rice's fake-patriotic poetic sludge, and having been unable to do so, for what I would like to think was the obvious reason of good taste, the poor composer seems to have been in a state approaching desperation. In this state he was apparently utterly willing to sacrifice the grandly inspiring "Jupiter" music.

(2) Why the words and music are essentially unrelated. Holst didn't in fact set the text to music. He just pasted it onto a cobbled version of the "Jupiter" music.


YOU SAY YOU DON'T AGREE THAT THESE WORDS
AND THIS MUSIC ARE ESSENTIALLY UNRELATED?

One of the reasons I chose the video version we had at the top of this post was because it's equipped with subtitles. Here's another version, and I know that I for one wouldn't be able to make out more than the occasional word if I didn't have the text in front of me.



I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
entire and whole and perfect, the service of thy love;
the love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
that lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
the love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
the love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

[I heard my country calling, away across the sea,
across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me.
Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,
and round her feet are lying the dying and the dead.
I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns,
I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.]

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,
most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
we may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
and soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
and her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

[Note: That middle stanza has for the most part discreetly disappeared, thank goodnedss. By the way, can you guess without prompting that the "other country" of the third stanza is heaven?]

-- text by Cecil Spring-Rice, music by Gustav Holst

AS AN EXAMPLE OF MIS-FIT WORDS AND MUSIC,
LISTEN TO THE DOPIEST LINE IN THE POEM

I mean, of course the line in the first stanza "the love that asks no question, the love that stands the test." There's no expressive justification for that sudden drop in pitch, which does nothing except to drop the music almost below the reach of the singer. I suppose you could argue that causing this line to drop out of range is actually an accomplishment. After all, "love that asks no question" isn't love, or stirring patriotism; it's robotic imbecility. The measure of a country's solidity and durability isn't its ability to eliminate questions; it's its ability to recognize legitimate questions and deal honestly and forthrightly with them.

I realize that for many Brits singing or hearing "I vow to thee, my country," this moment of near-unsingability, with its "love that asks no question," is an emotional high point, the voicing of deep emotional truth. Those singers and hearers may imagine that the music is voicing what made the British Empire great. In fact, it's music to accompany the collapse of that empire.


BUT SURELY, YOU SAY, SOMETHING EMOTIONALLY
RESONANT COMES THROUGH ALL THE SAME?

Well, yes, and that's a tribute to the indomitable power of the music, especially when it's decoupled from those dopey words, as it was some of the time in the Upstairs Downstairs episode, where it provided underpinning for the creation of the Kindertransport. Again, per Wikipedia:

The Kindertransport (also Refugee Children Movement or "RCM") is the name given to the rescue mission that took place during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, and farms. Most of the rescued children survived the war. A small number were reunited with parents who had either spent the war in hiding or survived the Nazi camps, but the majority, after the war, found their parents had been killed.

Still, Holst's hymn version of his music seems to me to represent a crippling debilitation. On the purely musical level, there can be a huge difference between musical themes designed for instrumental performance and those meant for singing. Consider again that pitch drop at "the love that knows no question."

More generally here, music that in its original orchestral form is expansively long-breathed, generating such powerful cumulative force, is reduced to a shadow of its self when sung -- it seems to ramble aimlessly, sounding like an endlessly droning improvisation by a singularly terrible improviser. Sort of reminds you of our own "Star-Spangled Banner," doesn't it? Which is a terrible comedown for music of such potency.


THE POWER OF THIS MUSIC COULDN'T REDUCE TO
WORDS, EVEN IF THEY WERE LESS DOPEY WORDS

For one thing, in its original form Holst is quite open about letting us hear how the noble, majestic central theme is created out of the "Bringer of Jollity" music, and that transformation is an important part of how it generates its emotional force. Let's listen to the beginning of the movement, and note how Holst crystallizes the initial hubbub into his main "jollity" theme, notably at 0:58 of the clip, and then how that theme metamorphoses into its unexpected new form at 2:51 -- when we're probably expecting something more along the lines of the 0:58 moment.

"Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity": opening


Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. Decca, recorded September 1961

For that matter, the actual emergence of the new form of the original motif requires a fair amount of groundwork-laying, or perhaps throat-clearing.

"Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity": setting the stage for "the theme"


Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Neville Marriner, cond. Philips, recorded c1977

By the way, "the theme" is brought back at the end of "Jupiter," more or less.

"Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity": conclusion


London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. EMI, recorded 1978-79


NOW IT'S TIME TO HEAR ALL OF "JUPITER,"
IN ALL THREE OF OUR PERFORMANCES

One of these weeks we should probably do The Planets, or at least more of The Planets. But for now let's just put "Jupiter" back together.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone make more of the rambunctious spirits of "Jupiter" than Herbert von Karajan, while Sir Adrian Boult -- in the last of his recordings (five, is it?) -- takes a grandly broader view. Neville Marriner, though he actually times out slightly longer than Boult, seems to me to land happily in the middle. All three orchestras seem to be having a grand time.

HOLST: The Planets, Op. 32:
iv. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity


Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. Decca, recorded September 1961

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. EMI, recorded 1978-79

Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Neville Marriner, cond. Philips, recorded c1977

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