Easter Fun Childrens Drop in Activity

Date: 8th April 2013

Rare Holst Manuscript Saved

Date: 8th April 2013

An early draft of Gustav Holst’s work Beni Mora has been purchased by the Holst Birthplace Museum at auction.

Visitors can see the rare Holst manuscript on display at the Holst Birthplace Museum this Spring. The original autograph manuscript is a draft for Holst’s ‘eastern’ orchestral piece, Beni Mora, which was inspired by his holiday in Algeria in 1908. It was recently purchased at auction and will be on show until May 2013.

The four- page sketch, dotted with deletions, alterations and revisions is a fascinating insight into how the composer worked and how his ideas changed as he wrote a piece. Holst composed Beni Mora in the period just before he started his masterpiece and best-known piece, The Planets.  He had yet to become a successful composer and was eager to be recognized. Beni Mora is an important work, not just because it reveals his interest in ‘eastern’ culture, something which he demonstrated in his ‘Indian’ works, such as Savitri and Choral Hymns from The Rig Veda, but because it is his last major work before The Planets.

Holst had a genuine interest in ‘eastern’ culture. The Moorish melodies he heard on Algerian streets poured onto the page to create a distinct sound. When Beni Mora was first performed in 1912 the reaction was mixed. The Musical Times commented: ‘It’s clever mingling of dance music, such as might issue from the cafes, with the music of an Arab procession passing from the desert through the town and out into the desert again, was an interesting feat of imagination and technique.’ However another critic was less enamored: ‘We do not ask for Biskra dancing girls in Langham Place.’

The Holst Museum secured a number of grants to purchase the manuscript for its collection, namely The Friends of the National Libraries, The Trafford Memorial Fund, and an anonymous donation. This generosity has enabled the manuscript to be available to the general public, as well as scholars. The manuscript will be part of an interactive showcasing all of the Museum’s Holst manuscripts. This is due to be launched in September as part of the Holst Discovery Space, a new room in the Museum dedicated to finding out more about the Museum’s stored collections.

Laura Kinnear, Curator of the Holst Birthplace Museum, says: ‘The Museum is very pleased to have this draft of Beni Mora for its collection. Original Holst manuscripts rarely come up at auction, and when they do they are highly sought after. After it has been on exhibition, it will form an important part in our exciting interactive about Holst’s manuscripts, due to be installed in September this year.

Date: 27th March 2013

The Museum is collaborating with the University of Gloucestershire and the Cheltenham Festival of Literature in the 2013 Cheltenham Illustration Awards.

During the period 1914-1916 Cheltenham-born Gustav Holst (1874-1934) composed The Planets, a seven-piece orchestral suite. Holst called the work 'a series of mood pictures'.  Entries should be a personal visual response initiated by this arguably the best-known, best-loved and first Modernist piece of British classical music.

Winners will be exhibited in October as part of the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, and published in a full colour Annual.   Prizes of cash and an Apple computer will be awarded - for full details and application forms please visit www.cheltenham-illustration-awards.com.

The award winning graphic novelist Posy Simmonds has kindly agreed to judge this year's competition.

Date: 21st March 2013

The Museum was a source of artistic inspiration for a group of sketchers in January and February. The Cheltenham U3A Sketch Group visited every Monday over the past two months to draw objects and rooms in the house.

Kitchen By Ann Reade
Regency Room By Ann Reade		Bedroom By Ann Reade

Honours for our President, and for our Patron, Michael Berkeley

Date: 13 March 2013

The Trustees are delighted to report that our President, Martyn Brabbins, and one of our Patrons, Michael Berkeley, have each received a significant honour in the first weeks of 2013.

On 31 January Martyn was appointed an Honorary Doctor of Music by the University of Bristol.  The extensive oration was given by John Pickard, Professor of Composition and Applied Musicology at the University.  He concluded the Oration with these words:

‘Martyn remains passionately committed to home, to family and to locally-based musical and educational projects. That commitment goes well beyond mere lip-service: during his directorship of the Cheltenham Music Festival he set up a scheme to commission new pieces and ran sponsored half-marathons to raise money to support it. More recently, with amateur musicians, he conducted a ‘Beethovenathon’ (all nine symphonies in a single day) to raise funds for his children’s local school and for CRY, the charity that promotes awareness of cardiac risk in the young.  This humanity and generosity, not to mention sheer musical talent, goes a long way to explaining why Martyn is not just admired and respected, but loved by professional orchestral musicians (a breed notoriously difficult to impress) and why the Guardian newspaper recently described him – with some accuracy I think – as an ‘anti-maestro’.

In early March it was announced that Michael Berkeley, who was awarded a CBE in 2012, had been appointed a Life Peer, and that he will sit in the House of Lords on the cross benches.  This award too reflects Michael’s substantial contribution to music and the arts, including a decade as artistic director of the Cheltenham Music Festival.  He is the composer of a substantial number of highly acclaimed works, including three operas, and he is also a broadcaster and an ardent advocate for the arts and British music. He has devoted many years to both the Royal Ballet, of which he is Chairman of the Board of Governors, and the Royal Opera House. He is also the presenter of the BBC Radio 3 programme Private Passions.

The Holst Birthplace Trust is privileged to have the support of these two eminent musicians and public figures and the Trustees send congratulations to them both.

Graham Lockwood

Date: 2 September -

13 January 2013

Theodor von Holst’s painting The Bride, 1840, is on show as part of Tate Britain’s current blockbuster exhibition showcasing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The painting was last seen in public at the Holst Birthplace Museum in 2010 in the exhibition, Theodor von Holst His Art & The Pre-Raphaelites. In the Tate exhibition, Theodor is rightly acknowledged as a major influence on the movement.

VIEW EXHIBITION PAGE ON TATE GALLERY WEBSITE

Catalogues for Theodor von Holst His Art & The Pre-Raphaelites
are still available – please contact the museum for further details.

The Holst Birthplace Museum has been awarded a grant of £29,500 by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for its Holst Discovery Space project. This grant, added to the funds already raised or pledged by other trusts and supporters, completes the fund raising target of £64,000 needed for this project which will provide much better access to the Museum’s extensive Holst archive through modern display facilities and technology.

The Trustees are especially grateful to the other supporters of this initiative. Among those who have made generous donations or pledges are Comparo, a corporate benefactor of the Trust, who have given £10,000, and the Gloucestershire Environmental Trust, whose funds derive from landfill tax, for a commitment of £8,000. Other generous supporters of the scheme are the Summerfield Charitable Trust, the Promoting Cheltenham fund of the Borough Council and the Holst Foundation. Local financial help has also come for the Charles Irving Trust and Bill Parker, a Vice President of the Holst Birthplace Trust.

For more information about the Holst Discovery Space project.
Please see the monthly updates on the website

Holst Birthplace Museum volunteers who helped
mount the exhibition dressed in saris for the preview. From the left: Sara-Jayne, Hannah and Charlotte.

Visit the exhibition to experience the sights, sounds and aromas of Holst's Indian influences.

On a hot sunny afternoon at the beginning of October 2011, a walk down Regent Street in Cheltenham was a journey back through time, back 120 years in fact as a Victorian Street fair celebrated the opening of Cheltenham’s new opera house and theatre, known today as the Everyman Theatre.  In 1891 Gustav Holst was still at the Grammar School with a self-evident talent as a pianist and an emerging composer. His father Adolph was still organist and choirmaster at All Saints’ Church after more than twenty years,  As well as teaching  he played the piano regularly on the concert platforms of the town, occasionally performing keyboard duets with Gustav.

Young Gustav could again be found In Regent Street, 2011, playing his violin. His older self was also there in walking gear and, complete with trombone. Shy though Gustav was, he enthusiastically distributed Museum leaflets to those who passed by the Museum stall . They were joined by the maid Julia  and some of her friends and there was much interest in the HBM stall.

Many thanks to Sara Salvidge for organising and participating and to Liz Auster, and volunteers Velia Stevens,  John Drywood and  Richard De  Carteret (as a very convincing Gustav) and especially  Aaron Le Maistre as the young ,violin playing, Gustav – just as in the photograph.  Aaron’s sister is seen sitting at the desk. The afternoon was a real success for the Museum.

Circular Challenge: Team walks that extra mile to ensure challege success

‘The Museum entered a team of five for the Cheltenham Circular Challenge organised annually by Cleeve Vale Rotary and were delighted to find they had won the Corporate Team Challenge Trophy and a prize of £150 to recognize and to add to the £1,400 they raised through sponsorship. The awards were handed over outside the Museum recently. Special congratulations go to Carol Sadie and Richard Smith who both covered the full 26 mile course’.

Read Press Article

Click Image to view more information about The Gustav Holst Way

One of the principle lenders to the recent Theodor von Holst Bicentenary Exhibition was granted a special visit last Sunday at the Holst Birthplace Museum in Cheltenham. Katharine MacDonald, accompanied by her grand-daughter Rachel, was taken round the exhibition, after it had officially closed, by organiser Max Browne and Curator Laura Kinnear to view the key works collected by her grand father, the sculptor Alexander Munro and their historical importance for the ongoing appraisal of Holst in British Romatic Art. These works form the backbone of discoveries, recently made and reported, that greatly strengthen the link of Holst to the Pre-Raphaelite circle of artists and in particular to their charismatic leader Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  

Katharine, who is now 97, is the guardian of her grandfather’s important collection and relates a family anecdote of how many of Rossetti’s drawings were ‘saved from the waste-bin’ by Munro’s admiration for his friend’s draughtsmanship and his diligence in preserving the dozens of drawings that might have otherwise been lost.  The result of this legacy has been seen in recent weeks as two revelations relating to works by Rossetti and Holst in Katharine’s collection have led a leading art historian to declare that it has ‘given a new dimension to Rossetti scholarship’ - by association the same can be said of that of his artistic predecessor, Theodor von Holst, too.

During the three month run of the exhibition it has been revealed that Rossetti originally possessed the Holst sketchbook (the only one known) owned by Munro and that it was Rossetti that made the mysterious watercolour version of Holst’s masterpiece, The Bride painted in 1842 and bought by Munro’s early patron the Duchess of Sutherland. Rossetti saw it sometime later in its London home at Stafford House and reminisced of it as ‘a beautiful picture’.

In the next few years Katharine and her family are hoping to generate sufficient interest in their extensive collection to enable it to have a more permanent home near Alexander Munro’s birthplace in Inverness, Scotland

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A previously lost watercolour drawing by the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti has been found. It is a sketch of the painting, The Bride by the Gothic-Romantic artist Theodor von Holst (1810-1844) which is currently on display at the Holst Birthplace Museum, Cheltenham as part of the exhibition, Theodor von Holst: His Art & The Pre-Raphaelites. The sketch and painting have now been reunited, and are being exhibited side by side.

Rossetti’s high regard for the work of his romantic predecessor Theodor von Holst (1810-44) has always been known. Indeed he called Theodor von Holst ‘that great painter’ and owned one of von Holst’s sketchbooks. The Bride sketch, although previously known about, had been mislaid for many years, and until it resurfaced a few weeks ago it was attributed to one of the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ circle. Further appraisal of the work by amongst others the Theodor von Holst scholar Max Browne reveals it to be almost certainly by Rossetti himself. 

Once belonging to Rossetti’s sculptor friend, Alexander Munro, the sketch is still in private hands. It is mounted in one of Munro’s ‘commonplace’ notebooks along with many other less finished sketches by Rossetti.

This is very significant discovery, particularly in terms of von Holst’s reputation, adding considerably to the mounting evidence of admiration for him from the central figure of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the most important group of artists in British art history. It also adds much to the story of Rossetti, linking him once again to a beautiful and enigmatic woman.

Laura Kinnear, Curator of the Holst Birthplace Museum says, ‘This discovery really shows what an influence Theodor von Holst was on the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti’s beautiful drawing is a tribute to his love of von Holst’s work. The public have a real opportunity to see the sketch on display in the next couple of weeks before it returns to a private collection.’

Martin Myrone, Curator of 18th & 19th Century British Art, Tate Britain came to Cheltenham 3rd September to give a special talk about the art of Theodor von Holst as part of the exhibition, Theodor von Holst His Art & The Pre-Raphaelites. He is shown here with Laura Kinnear, Curator of the Holst Birthplace Museum at the lecture theatre at the University of Gloucestershire.

Important new acquisition supported by the Art Fund, the V&A/MLA Purchase Grant Fund and the Trafford Memorial Fund. Now on permanent display in the Museum.

The Museum is currently involved in collecting oral and written reminiscences from individuals who have connections to Gustav and Imogen Holst and 4 Clarence Road – now the Holst Birthplace Museum. Please contact the Museum if you have any reminiscences you would like to share or click here to download a reminiscence sheet.

In January 2009 the Museum received funding to run a series of composition workshops for a group of music pupils at Balcarras School. The aim of the project was for the group to produce a piece of music inspired by Gustav Holst’s Planets suite.

The pupils worked with the composer and Holst scholar Raymond Head, as well as a sitar player, a mandolin player and a percussion specialist.

The music was performed at Balcarras School and in the Imperial Gardens to mark The 75th Anniversary of Holst’s death, and at Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, as part of a month long Festival of Celebration exhibition of the project. The Festival of Celebration also showcased work produced by Bournside School who worked with Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, and Cirencester College who worked with the Corinium Museum.