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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Gustav Holst's The Hymn of Jesus (written in August 1917) has always been one of his most widely performed works. Its first performance in London in 1920 was an outstanding success; Vaughan Williams, the dedicatee, said he just ‘wanted to get up and embrace everyone and then get drunk’. Yet perhaps it is taken too much for granted. There remains the mystery why Holst chose to set an obscure Gnostic text in ancient Greek at a time of national catastrophe in the First World War. What was he offering his audience?
1 Evelyn Edgar, a recalcitrant singing pupil at St Paul's, recorded Hoist's changing mood in her diary still with the family. 5 June 1916 ‘Gussy was ratty over his last people & vented it on me’; 6 June ‘Gussie was furious’; 15 June ‘I had a singing lesson, he's most awfully strict nowadays’.
2 Hoist, and his friend W.G. Whittaker, knew M.T.J. Gueritte, founder in London in 1907 of the highly influential Société des Concerts Français, which instituted an understanding of French music in England for the first time.
3 Vexilla Regis Prodeunt was written by Bishop Venantius Fortunatus in 569 to celebrate the receiving of a relic of the True Cross at St Mary's Abbey, Poitiers, a gift of the Byzantine Emperor Justin II. It became the marching song of the Crusaders 500 years later. Vexilla was sung on Passion Sunday and until Maunday Thursday when the Blessed Sacrament was carried to the High Altar. Pange Lingua was a Good Friday hymn in the Roman Liturgy. Gounod had used Vexilla in his popular oratorio Rédemption, dedicated to Queen Victoria. Jonathan Harvey (an admirer of The Hymn of Jesus) has used both Vexilla and Pange in his Passion and Resurrection (1981).
4 Notes to Chandos CD CHAN8901 (1990).
5 For more about Mead see Tempo 187 (12 1993), p. 17 Google Scholar. Holst was never frightened to ask authorities in their field for help. At University College, London he had asked the distinguished historian Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909) who taught Indian history and literature from 1898, for help with Sita (Letter dated ‘Jan 17. 1901’ in the Holst Foundation). He had Sanskrit lessons from Dr Mabel Bode (d.1922) who had been appointed Assistant Lecturer at U.C.L. in 1909 and subsequently Lecturer in 1911.
6 Reprinted 1963 (London: John M Watkins).
7 See articles in Tempo 158 (September 1986), 160 (March 1987) and 166 (September 1988).
8 Just as some chorus members had objected to singing Holst's hymns to Hindu gods so, even as late as 1951 did Vaughan Williams mention with some disgust that some members of the Leith Hill Festival choir had objected strongly to the idea of dance in the Christian religion. They were rehearsing Holst's This Have I done for My True Love (‘Tomorrow Shall be My Dancing Day’) (1916).
9 Letter in Holst Foundation, Aldeburgh, Suffolk quoted in Holst's Music: A Guide by Dickinson, A.E.F. ed. Gibbs, Alan (London, 1995), p.26 Google Scholar.
10 According to Mead, saved from the labyrinth of ills and released from the bonds of fate and genesis (The Hynm of Jesus translated with comments by G R S Mead, 1907, pp.37–8).
11 Pierced or wounded so that the knot in the heart might be unloosed and lead to a desire to be re-born spiritually; and a desire to eat the Bread of Life, the Supersubstantial Bread (of the Eucharist), the spiritual nourishment of life (Mead, ibid., pp.38–9).
12 Mead, ibid., p.38
13 Mead, ibid., p.38.