Imogen Holst: A Life in Music (review)

The new biography of Imogen Holst is published by Boydell in conjunction with the Holst Foundation and the Britten—Pears Library as the seventh volume of the Aldeburgh Studies in Music series, edited by the Britten—Pears Librarian Christopher Grogan. This substantial and lavishly illustrated tome is a standard life and works biography with a very large difference. In the centre of this book is a transcript of Imogen's Aldeburgh Diary, a daily documentation of her first eighteen months (September 1952—March 1954) as Benjamin Britten's amanuensis.

As the daughter of Gustav Holst and later Benjamin Britten's amanuensis and close friend, Imogen Holst was connected with two of the most important figures in twentieth-century English music. The complexity and contradictions inherent in her relationships with these men deepen her importance to the historiography of British music, especially when we acknowledge her role as the arbiter of her father's legacy and early biographer of her mentor. These issues often lead us to overlook Imogen's own varied and fascinating musical life, including her early promise as a composer, leadership role in the folk dance movement, years working for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), and teaching at Dartington Hall.

The biography provides a wealth of new information, while deepening the reader's understanding of Imogen's complex personality. The book is prefaced with a touching foreword by the composer Colin Matthews, who worked closely with Imogen in her later years, editing many of the compositions of Gustav Holst for publication. His brief sketch captures her vitality and uninhibited joyfulness while not being afraid to recognize the contradictions and biases that were essential to her character.

The first section, written by Rosamund Strode, who, like Imogen was for many years at the centre of Britten's creative and cultural world, recounts Imogen's early years (1907—31), including her training at the Royal College of Music and travels in Europe. As the acknowledgements make clear (p. xviii), this section greatly benefited from interviews that Strode conducted over many years with those who knew Imogen. This is a devotedly written account by one of Imogen's closest friends, and reminds one of the tone and accessibility of her own biography of her father. Young Imogen is portrayed as a talented and precocious woman, who adores her caring but distant father. One letter, from when Imogen was 17, is particularly telling in this respect: 'Gussie . . . has developed a sudden passion for Thaxted scenery, before he treated it with mild indifference. That is all very well, but it leaves him in complete possession of the place, and as he has to be absolutely alone, his family is/are banished' (p. 21). Throughout, one gets almost no sense of her relationship with her mother, or of the dynamics of her parents' marriage, which often found her mother living in Thaxted and her father in London, separated for long periods. Though the effect of Imogen's relationship with her parents on her adult life is left largely untouched, this section adds a great deal to the factual understanding of the Holst family biography, for example the account of Imogen's early education at the Froebel Demonstration School, which seems to be indebted to the educational theories of the German Theosophist Rudolf Steiner (p. 5).

There are, though, fascinating gaps in coverage that are often the Achilles heel of histories heavily based on first-hand recollection. For example, we learn that Imogen was a student of Herbert Howells at St Paul's Girls' School, but there is no discussion of their teacher—student relationship, or what, if anything, Imogen may have gained from the experience (except perhaps some knowledge of counterpoint (p. 26)). Imogen's relationships and interactions with George Dyson, Gordon Jacob, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, her teachers at the Royal College of Music, are similar gaps, which might provide much insight into her...