Everything about Imogen Holst totally explained
Imogen Claire Holst,
CBE (
April 12,
1907-
March 9,
1984) was a
British composer and
conductor, and the only child of
composer Gustav Holst.
Imogen Holst was brought up in west London and educated at
St Paul's Girls' School, where her father was director of music. She worked with
Herbert Howells before entering the
Royal College of Music in 1926 to study composition with
George Dyson and
Gordon Jacob,
harmony and
counterpoint with
Ralph Vaughan Williams, and conducting with William H. Reed. She won several prizes for composition including the Cobbett prize for a string quartet (1928).
In 1931 Holst began earning her living as a freelance musician, though her hopes of being a concert pianist were dashed by incipient
phlebitis in her left arm.
In April 1939 Holst went to Switzerland to study, and she returned just before the outbreak of war. She served on the
Bloomsbury House Refugee Committee, working for musicians from Austria and Germany, and in January 1940 was appointed by Sir
Henry Walford Davies to be one of six musicians charged with inspiring and organizing musical activities among civilians in rural areas. The scheme, originally funded by the
Pilgrim Trust, was taken over by the newly formed Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, forerunner of the
Arts Council of Great Britain.
In July 1951 she resumed her freelance career, and in the autumn of 1952 the composer
Benjamin Britten asked her to come to
Aldeburgh,
Suffolk, to help with his opera
Gloriana. She had first met him and his partner the tenor
Peter Pears in the 1940s and they became close friends. She lived in Aldeburgh for the rest of her life, initially working closely with Britten both as his music assistant and for the
Aldeburgh Festival, of which she was an artistic director from 1956 to 1977.
In 1964 Imogen Holst left Aldeburgh to concentrate on the recording and editing the music of her father. With composer
Colin Matthews she edited scholarly editions of her father's works (including four volumes of facsimiles) and compiled
A Thematic Catalogue of Gustav Holst's Music (1974).
She was appointed
CBE in 1975, a fellow of the
Royal College of Music in 1966 and an honorary member of the
Royal Academy of Music in 1970. She received honorary doctorates from the universities of
Essex (1968),
Exeter (1969), and
Leeds (1983).
She is buried in the churchyard of Saint Peter and Saint Paul's Church in
Aldeburgh,
Suffolk,
England. Her grave can be found directly behind those of
Benjamin Britten and
Peter Pears.
In 2007, Boydell Press published
Imogen Holst: A Life in Music, edited by Christopher Grogan et al., to celebrate the 100th anniversary of her birth.
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