Edmund Rubbra remembering Gustav Holst (2026) - Short Documentary

[00:00:15]I looked up at Holst as almost a god and you felt that he was getting to your very soul when he looked at you. You knew exactly that he was absolutely right. He was seeing right almost into your brain. He was my mentor not only in composition but in harmony and counterpoint and other things outside music too because he was a sort of widely versed personality that uh a lesson could be anything but music.

[00:00:42]Sometimes we talk about literature or politics or anything.

[00:00:47]Gustav Holst is known throughout the world as the composer of the planets.

[00:00:52]But to those who knew him personally, he was much more than a great composer. In this rare interview recorded more than 40 years after his death, composer Edmund Dubra remembers the man, the teacher, and the friend who shaped his life.

[00:01:30]Heat up here.

[00:01:58]I first knew the music of Hol in I suppose 1918 or thereabouts when I was still in Northampton which was my hometown. It came about in a curious way. I was having lessons from my teacher, piano teacher, who had a a vast library of music. And while I was waiting for my lesson one day, he put me into his library and uh I wasn't given to sitting still under these circumstances. And I roamed around his shelves and found what was a very curious titled work, the Rig Vader hymns by Gustav Fholst as he was then known.

[00:02:42]I was so intrigued because I was interested in eastern things generally at that time. I was so intrigued by the title that I asked my teacher if I could borrow it. And I remember going through these rig vida hymns with enormous excitement. They were revealed quite a new type of music for me who had been brought up in a modern with modern music of the impressionist type and uh I knew nothing more about him for some years after.

[00:03:13]I happened to be a pupil of uh Eivelynh Howard Jones in London later and he said to me and Sirill Scott, I was a pupil of Sirill Scott for composition and one day he said to me, would you like to go in for a composition scholarship at Reading University?

[00:03:32]Oh, I said yes. Only to find to my extraordinary delight that uh Hol was a teacher there.

[00:03:41]So I went there like that without knowing that I was going to halt and it couldn't have been a better move from my point of view.

[00:03:54]Well now the thing that I remember most about his teaching which surprised me he used no tech textbook whatever he wouldn't have anything to do with them.

[00:04:07]How was I to learn counterpoint if he didn't? And the same with harmony.

[00:04:13]But what he did was to go to music that he was interested in which was mostly 16th and 17th century music and put the music in front of me and deduce from that music the contraental methods.

[00:04:30]So in a sense it was an alive approach, not a dead one. He always thought of textbooks as being um a resumeumé of what people had done but that was all it wasn't an alive approach of getting at uh contropont techniques through the music itself. So we studied the Elizabeth and composers that he was keen on. Bird uh Wilks I remember he was particularly keen on uh Victoria amongst the Italians. He put Victoria by the way above Palestrina from his point of view.

[00:05:06]Interesting. And PEL.

[00:05:10]So I got to know those the music of those composers very thoroughly, not only by hearing them as much as one could because he he did perform them at his wits and tide festivals, but analyzing them and getting to know how their counterpoint worked and that was most invaluable.

[00:05:31]When we were at uh when I was at Reading University, the planets were beginning to be known early 1920s and wherever whenever I could possibly go to hear the planets, I would hear it because I was immensely excited by it and still am. He wouldn't talk about his own music. The only occasion I was put into touch with his music, this was at Reading, I think, was a work which he had the proofs of and hadn't time to correct them. And he said, "Would you do this for me?" It was settings of some Greek words, I think, in translation.

[00:06:14]And that was the only occasion when he put his music in front of me.

[00:06:21]It's heat.

[00:07:02]Um whenever I took anything to him, particularly an orchestral score, he would say, "Well, the next thing you do is to uh take out all the unnecessary notes."

[00:07:14]which was a very great discipline to see if in taking all those notes away one arrived at something which was not only simpler but more effective.

[00:07:25]So as I've said on many occasions he pair we paired to the bone what I took to him. I remember one extraordinary instance of this at Reading University.

[00:07:36]I took to him a work for piano and orchestra and there was a a terrific problem which we discussed in it but we couldn't resolve it.

[00:07:46]I thought, well, we'll talk about it next lesson in a week's time. But before that next lesson, I'd had a card from Hol with the solution, his solution on it. So it it showed you see that he didn't uh forget uh his people's problems during the intervening time which I think is remarkable for a man of his uh ability and what he was doing at the time to hold the composers his pupil's work in his mind and solve it for him. It wasn't a solution which he insisted upon. It was his solution for us to talk over.

[00:08:25]But the very fact that he did it was interesting.

[00:08:33]He was somewhat untidily dressed rather like a a smaller Vaughn Williams. He was a uh slightly pudgy.

[00:08:46]And uh but the interesting and most noticeable feature were his eyes. He had very strong glasses and they were piercingly direct eyes and you felt that he was getting to your very soul when he looked at you or when he criticized uh something you were doing and he looked at you, you knew exactly that he was absolutely right. He was seeing right almost into your brain.

[00:09:13]He put me onto the novels of Joseph Conrad which I didn't know. He was particularly fond of one called Lord Jim which I read. He was enormously fascinated by Conrad. And then I know he told me about a a sociological book by Benjamin Kidd.

[00:09:33]I've forgotten its name but one of the he was one of the very early socialists because Hol you see was belonged to the Hammersmith socialist group at one time and um in all sorts of ways he he um introduced me to to literature that I hadn't known hither too. I once took him a setting um I believe it was of Walt Whitman words and I set it for piano. I think it was piano and two teners.

[00:10:12]Why I chose two teners, I just don't know at the moment. I can't remember.

[00:10:17]Host looked at this core without saying a word for several minutes and I was wondering what on earth he was going to say. He looked up at me and with those piercing eyes of his he said, "But are there two teners that I should never forget It didn't remain static. Another composer could have rested on his laurels with the planets, but not so with Hol. In fact, I rather feel that Hol hadn't a good opinion of the planet sometimes by what he said. At any rate, he didn't stand still. He went on experimenting and that's part of his philosophy. go on evolving through uh tackling something which is little beyond your powers each time. So you've always got something to stretch your imagination.

[00:11:32]You see the planets has caught the public's imagination largely probably through the title. I don't know. It's a marvelous idea anyway and an original one and uh it's become increasingly popular as time has gone on and I can't quite see what other work could attain that popularity.

[00:11:56]One thinks of the coral symphony which is a marvelous work I think and the opening of it is one of the supreme things in in British music of the 20th century but I can't imagine it being as popular as a planets. It's remoter in a way. I suppose remoteness is a characteristic one could say of hol later work rather than cold or passionless. It's remote but one's got to come in into in into contact with it on it on its own terms. There's a lyric movement for viola uh which I think is a splendid word but it's hardly known and the later cannons that he wrote experimental cannons each voice of which is in a different key.

[00:12:44]It's a marvelous tour of force both of harmony and counterpoint.

[00:12:49]Um, I think they're they're quite remarkable.

[00:13:11]There's no there's no gather.

[00:13:31]for the last What can >> do?

[00:14:06]>> Simplicity was always his uh the key note of his teaching. Make everything practical and simple. He would have no truck for instance with uh an instrument going out of its its most effective register as they do in the atonard music of today. Whether he was right in that I just don't know. But he said always um from the scoring point of view everything comes up better if the instruments are used in their most effective uh compass.

[00:14:45]My last uh meeting with Horse was in the year he died when he was quite ill, but he kept his interest in what I was doing to the very end. And I just finished a violin and piano sonata and he was anxious to hear it. He couldn't get anywhere to hear it. So I remember myself and a violinist went over to play it to him where he was somewhere in West London, but I can't remember the address.

[00:15:12]and uh he he kept up his enthusiasm right to the very end. Was remarkable really I was engaged uh at that time on a symphonia concante for piano and orchestra. I'd finished two movement I think and the last one I wrote as a prelude and fug in memoriam gustav host it affected the uh third movement of that work I was immensely you know distressed by his passing Heat.

[00:16:45]Heat.