The Planets Op.32 (1914–16)

Jupiter, the bringer of jollity: allegro giocoso – andante maestoso – tempo 1

Saturn, the bringer of old age: adagio – andante

Uranus, the magician: vivace

Neptune, the mystic: andante – allegretto

Although the two-piano version of The Planets was written before the orchestral score, it cannot claim to be the original version – if, that is, “original” implies that Holst regarded it as a finished work in that form. It has the same relationship to the orchestral score as a finely detailed pencil or pen-and-ink sketch to an oil painting. Indeed, the two-piano score, which was published 15 years after the composer’s death, carries the ocasional colour annotation – “like harp harmonics” at the beginning of Saturn, “voices in the distance” at the end of Neptune – of much the same kind as those to be found on an artist’s black and white sketch. Even so, while The Planets was an orchestral concept from the start, influenced by recent hearings of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces, the two-piano version offers a valid alternative experience of Holst’s extraordinary inspiration here.

Perhaps the most convincing movement of all in the two-piano score is Mars, the bringer of war, Holst’s extraordinary and terrifying vision of mechanised warfare written at a time, just before the First World War, when no tank had ever been deployed on the battlefield. Indeed – in reflecting the clinical violence and the denaturised quality of the piece as the war machine advances in a sinister quintuple-time march – the percussive articulation of the pianos is at least as effective as the weight of the orchestra. Consolation comes in the next piece, Venus, the bringer of peace, but less effectively perhaps in the present version which lacks the personal voices of the horn rising through the first four notes, of the solo violin as the tempo rises to Andante, and of the solo cello as the tempo reverts to Adagio. The absence of the solo violin and woodwind instruments in the middle section of Mercury, the winged messenger is less regrettable, since the essence of the piece is its fleet-footed rhythmic ingenuity and glitteringly brilliant bitonal sound, nothing of which is lost in the piano scoring.

Imogen Holst, the composer’s daughter, regretted that her father recycled the tune of the Andante maestoso midle section of Jupiter, the bringer of jollity in the hymn ‘I vow to thee my country.’ “Overwork,” she said, “had reduced him to a condition in which he was uable to sit down and write even a short comission.” True, the assocation of that splendid melody with the hymn does threaten jollity with solemnity but at the same time it has helped to make Jupiter so familiar that memory inevitably supplies whatever orchestral colours might be lacking in the piano version. Imogen expressed no such misgivings about her father’s allusion to a section of Saturn, the bringer of old age in ‘Turn Back O Man’ in the Three Festival Choruses, where its presence is entirely appropriate. In whatever colours it appears, that material, beginning as the tempo rises to animato over an ostinato tread in the bass, unerringly conveys its mortal message. Given the hollow harmonies and the syncopated panic as real time conflicts with imagined time, the harp harmonics and the dread sound of the bass oboe in the first part of the piece are no more than optional extras, just as are the arabesques on woodwind and harps in the reconciled second half.

Assuming the echoes of L’Apprenti sorcier are not deliberate, Uranus, the magician sounds less derivative without bassoons to perform the grotesque dance after the introduction of the derisively incantatory four-note motto theme in the opening bars. Another advantage in the present version is the moment towards the end where, immediately after a strident ffff climax, the dynamic level drops to a sudden and long-held pp chord with a magical effect peculiar to the piano. As for Neptune, the mystic, the pianos have nothing to replace the shimmering harp background to the opening theme and nothing, of course, to simulate the sound of the female voices which enter after the rippling arpeggios fall silent and which recede into the far distance at the end. On the other hand, the lucid harmonies and sustained melodic lines – in quintuple time like Mars and similarly disembodied but with a diametrically opposite effect – are scarcely less meaningful in black and white.