Gustavius Theodore Von Holst was born on the 21st September 1874, and was of Russian, Swedish, German, Spanish, and possibly Irish extraction — his mother’s Spanish great-great- grandmother had once been abducted by an Irish peer, and forced to live in Ireland. Holst’s grandfather, also called Gustavius, had taught the harp, and his great grandfather, Matthias, had been a pianist and composer at the Russian Imperial Court.

When Holst was eight his beloved mother suddenly died, leaving him, and his younger brother (the actor Ernest Cossart, who had a long career in Hollywood playing portly butlers) to be brought-up by his father’s sister Nora, a tearful and romantic woman who had once strewn flowers at the feet of Franz Liszt. But although Holst suffered with congenitally weak eyes, and severe asthma, his life at 4 Clarence Road does seem to have been a happy one with, naturally enough, Adolph teaching the young Gustav to play the piano and violin.

In 1885, with his father newly re-married, the 12 year old Holst entered Cheltenham Grammar School where he excelled in musical theory and composition. But due to the onset of neuritis in his right arm and hand he failed to get the much hoped for scholarship to the Royal College of Music.

Seven years later at the age of 18 ( when the 35 year old Edward Elgar was writing his first oratorio The Black Knight and the 30 year old Fritz Delius had already seen his first opera, Irmelin, performed the previous year) the disappointed, rather gaunt and thickly bespectacled Gustav Holst cycled the few miles to the Cotswold village of Wyck Rissington to take up the post of organist and choirmaster at the local church.

Holst took his job seriously and his reputation soon spread. Within a few months he’d moved from Wyck Rissington to nearby Bourton-on-the-Water as Choirmaster of that town’s Choral Society. But all the time Holst’s neuritis was getting worse making it almost impossible for him to play the organ and conduct. Perhaps as some kind of therapy Holst often took himself off into the Cotswold Hills where, finding a quiet spot, he wrote music, lots of music. It paid off.

The year 1893 saw Holst’s first composition, the operetta, Lansdowne Castle, performed at the Cheltenham Corn Exchange. His father was so impressed that he borrowed the £90 required to finally send his son to the Royal College of Music.

A reinvigorated Holst was in his element at the RCM and studied composition with the Irish composer Sir Charles Villiers Standford (he even learned the trombone, an instrument which became his musical bread and butter some years later), and met the young Ralph Vaughan-Williams, with whom he had a long, and mutually supportive friendship.

Holst graduated from the RCM in 1898 and took a job playing trombone with the orchestra of the Carl Rosa Opera. In the same year Edward Elgar composed one of his most loved and enduring pieces, the Enigma Variations.