Holst did find a solution to his competitive ambition and physical inability and left his mark cover the 1911 “Queen of Fortune Tellers” program, which listed 28 copyists who copied roughly 1,500 pages of fragments over 18 months. “Planet” was similarly daring, especially as a project undertaken through the war. His student Jane Joseph commented that he “resigned himself to the necessity of having a huge orchestra that no one could afford in times of war.”
To help prepare “The Planets”, Holst recruited Joseph, in addition to Lasker and Day, who were music teachers at St. Paul’s to act as his guardians. Because neuritis particularly affected his writing hand, Holst once referred to women as his “three right hands”; Imogen Holst, the composer’s daughter, described their role in completing the 198 pages of the entire rating as “invaluable”.
There was no free time through the school week, so the writing of Planets took place on weekends, with activities centered across the recent, soundproof music room in St. Paul’s. (The room still serves as a music room, and a sign on the door reads “Mr. Holst’s Room.”) Holst, sitting away from the piano, would ask them to check out material, dictate portions of the rating, or provide orchestration suggestions.
Some idea of what this environment was like may be present in the memoirs Lasker wrote for the varsity magazine Paulina in 1960:
He had a sketch of a piano and in red ink he wrote down what instrument was playing on each note. In one other room, Jane Joseph, certainly one of his students, was working on one other a part of the rating. As soon as she and Nora Day had written 4 pages – all of us worked in the identical constructing – they brought it to me in one other room and I transcribed it for the piano. We did all the things in six weeks. We all worked eight hours a day, and I can not imagine every other composer working like that without worrying and losing his temper.
Fragments of the “Planet” manuscript can be found on the Internet via the Royal College of Music archivesand clearly display a similar collaborative process in motion. The rating for 2 pianos has Holst’s orchestration instructions written in red ink; in different places there are large sections crossed out and notes within the margins about whose handwriting is whose and where it changes.
In 2009, Holst scholar Alan Gibbs compiled a list of all of Lasker’s arrangements for Holst and others. It incorporates quite a few arrangements of “The Planets”, vocal scores for Holst’s operas “The Perfect Fool” and “At the Boar’s Head”, and original works on his “Japanese Suite”. There are also details of Lasker and Day’s similar relationship with Ralph Vaughan Williams, including piano arrangements of his “London”, “Pastoral” and the Fourth Symphony, in addition to his ballet “Job” and his Piano Concerto. They were created for various purposes: rehearsals, demonstrations, performances, as a sounding board for ideas, as a approach to persuade conductors and programmers to support the work.
