Close your eyes and picture outer space, and you probably hear sweeping strings and terrifying brass. The man who invented that sound did not care about astronomy at all. Gustav Holst was an exhausted part-time girls’ school music teacher obsessed with horoscopes, suffering from neuritis so severe he could barely hold a pen. This episode chronicles the agonizing creation of The Planets, from the 1913 holiday in Spain where Balfour Gardiner, Arnold Bax, and Clifford Bax got him hooked on the astrological writings of Alan Leo, through three years of weekend and holiday composing dictated note by note to his scribes Vally Lasker and Nora Day.

We walk through the suite movement by movement, including the hammering 5/4 of Mars completed before the First World War began, the bitonality of Mercury, the Jupiter melody Holst resented seeing turned into I Vow to Thee, My Country, the ticking clock of his favorite movement Saturn, and the offstage women’s chorus of Neptune faded out by slowly closing a door. Then we relive the chaotic private premiere at the Queen’s Hall in September 1918 with a two-hour rehearsal under young Adrian Boult, the vicious early reviews, the blazing tempos forced by 78 rpm recording, and the score’s lasting DNA in film music like Star Wars.

• Why the suite skips the Sun, Moon, and Earth and ignores orbital order in favor of psychological mood pictures
• What six timpani, a bass oboe, a celesta, and an organ were really for, according to Ralph Vaughan Williams
• The colleague who warned that an E minor and G sharp minor clash would sound frightful, and why Holst kept it anyway
• Why conductors cut Venus and Neptune and reordered movements to end on Jupiter, to Holst’s fury
• Colin Matthews’ Pluto the Renewer and how a dwarf-planet demotion vindicated Holst’s astrological approach