The man who wrote Mars, the Bringer of War, arguably the most violent orchestral music ever conceived, was a shy, asthmatic vegetarian socialist with terrible eyesight and a nerve condition that ruined his hands. This episode explores the staggering gap between Gustav Holst and his music, following him from a family of working musicians who invented the aristocratic von in their surname, through years paying rent as a trombonist in seaside bands and theater pits, to a lifetime teaching music to schoolgirls at St Paul’s and working-class adults at Morley College.

We trace how Holst escaped the shadow of Wagner with the help of his brutally honest friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, learned Sanskrit to translate the Rig Veda hymns himself, absorbed the English folk song revival, and discovered astrology on a Spanish holiday. Those threads converged in The Planets, written between 1914 and 1916, premiered privately at the Queen’s Hall as a parting gift before he shipped out to Greece, and released to a shell-shocked postwar public that made him famous almost overnight. Holst hated the celebrity so much he suffered a nervous collapse in 1924 and then pivoted to austere works like Egdon Heath, which he considered his most perfectly realized composition.

• How neuritis ended his piano ambitions and a doctor’s logic about lung capacity put a trombone in his hands
• Why sitting inside a working orchestra taught him more about blending sound than any textbook could
• What heavily chromatic music actually feels like and why Holst abandoned Wagner’s smudged colors for purity
• How writing for amateur choirs and bored orchestral players shaped his rule that every part must be interesting
• The polytonality and unconventional time signatures of his late works that influenced Benjamin Britten and the next generation