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 Her own music is not widely known and has received little critical attention; much of it is unpublished and unperformed.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
thumb|right|upright|The house in [[Barnes, London|Barnes where the Holst family lived between 1908 and 1913]]
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
left|thumb|upright=0.7| Gustav Holst circa 1920, drawn by [[William Rothenstein ]]
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. 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. Holst's main task with Gloriana was to copy Britten's pencil sketches and prepare the vocal and piano scores which the singers needed for rehearsals by February 1953. Later she assisted him with the writing of the full orchestral score, and performed similar services with his next opera, The Turn of the Screw (1954). When Britten was under pressure during the composition of his ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1956), Holst accompanied him to Switzerland, to remain by his side as he completed the work. She took great pleasure in her association with Britten's opera for children, Noye's Fludde (1957), for which she showed Britten how to achieve a unique raindrop effect by hitting a row of china mugs with a wooden spoon. She and Britten combined to collect and publish music for the recorder, in a series published by Boosey and Hawkes (1954–59), and jointly wrote a popular introductory book, The Story of Music (1958).
Holst continued to assist Britten with all his major compositions until 1964, at that point she determined to give priority to the final securing of her father's musical legacy, to re-establish her career as a composer, and to pursue a more independent path. She relinquished her post as Britten's assistant, while remaining personally devoted to Britten. She did not leave Aldeburgh, and continued her work with the annual Aldeburgh Festival.
Artistic director
In 1956 Holst's role in the Aldeburgh Festival was formalised when she joined Britten and Pears as one of the festival's artistic directors, taking responsibility for programmes and performers. For the 1956 festival she scheduled a performance of Gustav Holst's opera Savitri, the first of several Gustav Holst works that she introduced to the festival in the ensuing years. Savitri was offered as part of a double bill that included Imogen's arrangement of John Blow's 17th century opera Venus and Adonis. In 1957 she instituted late-night concerts, and in 1962 she organised a series devoted to Flemish music, in which she had recently become interested. She also devised frequent programmes of church music, for performance at Aldeburgh parish church. Since moving to Aldeburgh in 1952, Holst had lived in a series of lodgings and rented flats. In 1962 she moved to a small contemporary bungalow built for her in Church Walk, where she lived for the rest of her life. The house was built on the edge of the site where it had been hoped to build a Festival Theatre. When that plan was abandoned in favour of a move to Snape Maltings, the bungalow was built anyway by the architect H. T. Cadbury-Brown, who allowed Holst to live there rent-free.
In 1964 Holst began composing again, and in 1965 accepted commissions for two large-scale works: The Sun's Journey, a cantata for female voices, and the Trianon Suite, composed for the Trianon Youth Orchestra of Ipswich. In 1965 and 1966 she published two books, studies of Bach and Britten. The latter work caused some shock and surprise by failing to mention the contributions to Britten's successes of several key figures in Britten's earlier career who had subsequently fallen out of favour, such as his former librettists Eric Crozier and Ronald Duncan. Between 1966 and 1970 Holst recorded a number of her father's works with the Purcell Singers and the English Chamber Orchestra, under the Argo and Lyrita labels. Among these recordings was the Double Violin Concerto, which she conducted with Emanuel Hurwitz as soloist. Forty years earlier she had acted as the rehearsal pianist before the work's first performance.
thumb|left|The concert hall at Snape Maltings, home of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1967
Holst had formed the Purcell Singers, a small semi-professional choir, in October 1952, largely at the instigation of Pears. From 1954 the choir became regular performers at the Aldeburgh Festival, with programmes ranging from rarely heard medieval music to 20th-century works. Among choir members who later achieved individual distinction were the bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk, the tenors Robert Tear and Philip Langridge, and the founder and conductor of the Heinrich Schütz Choir, Roger Norrington. Langridge remembered with particular pleasure a performance in Orford church of Thomas Tallis's forty-part motet Spem in alium, on 2 July 1963. When she gave up the conductorship of the choir in 1967, much of its musical mission, in particular its commitment to early music, was assumed by other groups, such as Norrington's Schütz Choir and the Purcell Consort formed by the ex-Purcell Singers chorister Grayston Burgess.
On 2 June 1967 Holst shared the podium with Britten in the concert inaugurating the Aldeburgh Festival's new home at the Snape Maltings. From 1972 Holst was involved with the development of educational classes at the Maltings, which began with weekend singing classes and developed into the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies, with its own training orchestra. and a handbook for conductors of amateur choirs (1973). She continued to compose, usually short pieces but with occasional larger-scale orchestral works 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 different phases of the year. Her last major composition was a String Quintet, written in 1982 and performed in October of that year by the Endellion Quartet, augmented by the cellist Steven Isserlis.
In April 1979 Holst was present when Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother opened the new Britten–Pears School building in Snape. The building included a new library—the Gustav Holst Library—to which Holst had donated a large amount of material, including books which her father had used in his own teaching career. She had intended that, after 1977, her retirement from the Aldeburgh Festival would be total, but she made an exception in 1980 when she organised a 70th birthday celebration concert for Pears.
Death
Shortly after the 1977 Aldeburgh Festival, Holst became seriously ill with what she described as "a coronary angina". Thereafter, angina was a recurrent problem, although she continued to work and fulfil engagements. However, by early 1984 the deterioration in her health was noticeable to her friends. She died at home of heart failure on 9 March 1984 and was buried in Aldeburgh churchyard five days later in a plot a few yards away from Britten's. An obituary tribute in the magazine Early Music emphasised her long association with music in the Aldeburgh church, where she "[brought] iridescently to life facets of that tradition to which her own life had been dedicated and which she presented as a continuing source of strength and wonder". Ursula Vaughan Williams wrote: "Imogen had something of the medieval scholar about her ... content with few creature comforts if there was enough music, enough work, enough books to fill her days. Indeed, she always filled her days, making twenty-four hours contain what most of us need twice that time to do".
Holst never married, though she enjoyed a number of romantic friendships, notably with the future poet Miles Tomalin, whom she met when she was a pupil at St Paul's. The two were close until 1929, and exchanged poetry; Tomalin married in 1931. Many years after the relationship ended, Holst admitted to Britten that she would have married Tomalin.
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.
Music
Imogen Holst was a part-time composer, intermittently productive within her extensive portfolio of musical activities. In her earlier years she was among a group of young British women composers—Elizabeth Maconchy and Elisabeth Lutyens were others—whose music was regularly performed and broadcast. According to a later critic, her Mass in A minor of 1927 showed "confident and imaginative layering of voices, building to a satisfying Agnus Dei". However, for long periods in her subsequent career Holst barely composed at all. After the RCM, her most active years as a composer were at Dartington in the 1940s and the "post-Britten" period after 1964.