The Planets

The frame resists the subtractive test. Mars must open, because everything after it moves away from force; Neptune must close, because a fade is the only ending for a sequence that leaves the world; and Saturn, the longest movement, set fifth, is the hinge where the outward planets give way to the inward. Within the frame the test finds give. Mercury could go with little loss to the argument. Jupiter is a chain of dance tunes joined to a broad central tune, its episodes permitted rather than compelled, and the tune was lifted out whole to live as a hymn. Uranus repeats its march past what its idea needs. The movements are routinely played singly, and the suite does not resist it.

Score: 7.8 / 10

What is disclosed through sound is credited in full, and two movements disclose more than a mood. Mars shows force as mechanism: a battle that is not heroic, built from an ostinato in an asymmetric metre, strings tapping with the wood of the bow, the climaxes grinding over a pedal. Saturn shows age not as decline but as a passage through dread into acceptance: a slow tread of alternating chords, bells at the climax, then a calm the movement earns rather than asserts. The claim can be stated and holds: the forces that govern a life are dispositions, not gods, and a life passes from force toward stillness. What holds the axis is the rest. Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and Uranus render characters and moods with great skill, and on this axis a mood ranks below a meaning.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Height is reached often, and in several registers. The terror of Mars: the ostinato, the brass in fourths above it, the final hammered chords, and quiet passages as dreadful as the climaxes. The beauty of Venus: the solo horn rising, the flutes answering, the solo violin, the stillness of celesta and harps. The grandeur of Jupiter’s central tune, whatever later use has done to it. The dread and the release of Saturn, the suite’s greatest height, its bells and its quiet close. The organ’s sudden glissando and the collapse at the climax of Uranus, then a long hush. Neptune’s sublime of distance. Five of seven movements rise. Held below the top because Mercury is wit, Jupiter’s outer sections are jollity by title and in fact, and the march of Uranus is grotesque before it is sublime.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Myth is evoked across the suite and built in one movement. The figures the titles name are astrological dispositions, and they carry little archetypal structure of their own: “the Bringer of War” is a type, not a story. What is built is a passage from the warring world outward to the mystic, with age as the threshold: a life as a journey from Mars to Neptune, ending in disappearance. Saturn bears that load. Its tolling, its procession and its arrival at peace are a death and transfiguration in small, without a person in it. Elsewhere the patterns are summoned as colour: a magician on a stage, a messenger in motion, an English festival. As in all wordless music the particular is thinly kept, and here the titles keep it more than the notes.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The inheritance is the late Romantic programme suite and the large modern orchestra of Strauss, with three nearer models: Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces, heard in London in 1912 and 1914; Debussy’s Nocturnes, whose Sirènes had already used a wordless female chorus; and Stravinsky’s ballets. The departures were real for English music: an ostinato in 5/4 as the whole ground of a movement, bitonal layering in Mercury and Neptune, a fade to silence as an ending, a cosmology in place of the folk-song pastoral and the Elgarian ceremonial around it. The stake was modest: a little-known teacher writing for an orchestra he could not hope to hear, under no commission. The swerve is from his English surroundings more than from Europe, which had cleared the ground.

Score: 7.8 / 10

In two movements form is the knowledge. Mars cannot be stated in a regular metre: the limping five is the machine, and the ostinato is what force is. Neptune cannot end any other way: the fade, the chorus repeating one bar until it is lost, is the claim that the last planet is not reached but dissolved into. Saturn’s alternating chords are a clock, and its form is the clock stopping. The cost is the suite form itself. Seven character pieces in a row make a gallery, and a gallery’s frame contains rather than thinks. Mercury and Jupiter would say much the same in another order or apart, and the argument is carried by the two ends and the fifth movement more than by the whole design.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Evidence over promise, and more than a century of it, but uneven in kind. Performance yields on return: the orchestration of Venus, Saturn and Neptune keeps giving detail, and the tempo of Mars stays open. The interpretative literature is thinner than the work’s fame: the biographies by Imogen Holst and Michael Short, Raymond Head’s studies of the astrology and the sources, and little sustained analysis beside them. Whether the order means a life or a horoscope, and how far Schoenberg reached into the score, are real questions, and they have not drawn the re-examination the desk’s highest pages show. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is familiarity: for many listeners Mars and Jupiter are exhausted early, not by return but by repetition outside the hall.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The field is the concert music of its tradition and decade: the European orchestra of 1910 to 1920, with The Rite of Spring, Schoenberg’s pieces, Debussy’s Jeux and Mahler’s late symphonies. Against that field the work reorganised little of what music could do. Its means came from Paris, Vienna and St Petersburg; its achievement was to command them in one legible design. In English music it was larger: it opened the English orchestra to the modern repertory of rhythm and colour. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is documented and wide, though mostly outside the concert hall, where the suite became a template for the orchestral sound of space, war and wonder in film scoring from the middle of the century on. In concert composition it is narrower.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over about 108 years from the first performance. The form survives whole: the score is complete, published and played as Holst left it. Presence is among the widest of any orchestral work of its century: continuously performed and recorded since the 1920s, a staple of the Proms and of orchestras worldwide, and its central tune sung as a hymn at national occasions. That breadth earns at most a tenth, and part of it is wear: Jupiter’s tune is now often heard as a patriotic anthem the suite never wrote, and Mars as cinema. The surface fixed to its moment is small; the astrology is a frame, not a topicality. The wear holds the figure a tenth below the top of its step.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The command of the orchestra is the highest part of the making and bears weight: the col legno strings, harps and timpani of the ostinato in Mars; the high, luminous Venus, flutes, celesta and solo violin; the cross-rhythms of Mercury; the procession in the low instruments of Saturn; the timpani under Uranus and the organ’s sudden glissando; the placing of chorus and celesta in Neptune, where the fade is written into the orchestration itself. Every movement is exactly heard. The costs are in the composition rather than the scoring. Development gives way to ostinato and repetition; Jupiter’s sections are joined by transitions that serve rather than compel; Uranus leans on sequence. The counterpoint and the large-scale harmonic thinking are plainly lesser than the scoring.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Jupiter’s English festival tunes and Neptune’s bitonal chords dissolving offstage. They obey one law in part: each movement is a planet’s character, held as a disposition, and the whole moves from the near and forceful to the far and still. Shared means support the law: ostinato as the ground of Mars, Saturn and Neptune; quintuple metre at both ends; bitonality and stacked fourths in Mercury, Saturn and Neptune. The range is wide: battle, love, play, festivity, age, magic and mysticism. But the law loosens where the movements stand alone. Jupiter’s central tune is another world, nationally coloured, its broad diatonic song outside the harmonic language of the other six. A gallery’s unity is a frame’s unity more than an inner law.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The suite names a large range: war and the state at arms in Mars; love and peace in Venus; the mind in Mercury; communal festivity, and through the tune the nation, in Jupiter; age and death in Saturn; illusion and its collapse in Uranus; the sacred beyond form in Neptune; and over all of it the cosmos as the frame of a human life. That is a wider span than most orchestral suites attempt, and the cosmological frame joins several orders. What holds the figure is integration: the orders arrive one to a movement, each in its own room, more listed than held together, and labour, the family and history are absent. The form holds its orders side by side, and the figure records it.

Score: 7.3 / 10