page_title: Imogen Holst
section_title: Assistant to Britten
hierarchical_section_title: Imogen Holst / Career / Aldeburgh / Assistant to Britten
caption_attribution_description: Publicity photograph of British composer Benjamin Britten
context_page_description: Imogen Clare Holst CBE was a British composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, musicologist, and festival administrator. The only child of the composer Gustav Holst, she is particularly known for her educational work at Dartington Hall in the 1940s, and for her 20 years as joint artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. In addition to composing music, she wrote composer biographies, much educational material, and several books on the life and works of her father.
  From a young age, Holst showed precocious talent in composing and performance. After attending Eothen School and St Paul's Girls' School, she entered the Royal College of Music, where she developed her skills as a conductor and won several prizes for composing. Unable to follow her initial ambitions to be a pianist or a dancer due to health reasons, Holst spent most of the 1930s teaching, and as a full-time organiser for the English Folk Dance and Song Society. These duties reduced her compositional activities, although she made many arrangements of folksongs.
context_section_description: When Holst joined Britten, the financial arrangement was vague; Britten paid her on a piecemeal basis rather than a regular salary, unaware that she had made over her rights to her father's estate to her mother and had little money of her own. As a result, she lived very frugally in Aldeburgh, but her commitment to Britten overrode her own physical comfort.  For the next dozen years her life was organised around the joint objectives of assisting Britten and developing the Aldeburgh Festival. Alongside this work, she made many choral and vocal arrangements, promoted her father's music, and wrote books, articles and programme notes.
  For the first 18 months of her association with Britten, Holst kept a diary which, Grogan says, forms a record of her "unconditional belief in Britten's achievement and status, and her absolute devotion to his work".  The first of Britten's works to which she made a significant contribution was the opera Gloriana, scheduled to form part of the 1953 Coronation celebrations. The short timescale for the writing of the opera placed considerable pressure on the composer and his new assistant, strains that were dramatised 60 years later in a radio play, Imo and Ben. Holst's main task with Gloriana was to copy Britten's pencil sketches and prepare the vocal and piano scores which the singers needed for rehearsals by February 1953. Later she assisted him with the writing of the full orchestral score, and performed similar services with his next opera, The Turn of the Screw (1954). When Britten was under pressure during the composition of his ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1956), Holst accompanied him to Switzerland, to remain by his side as he completed the work.  She took great pleasure in her association with Britten's opera for children, Noye's Fludde (1957), for which she showed Britten how to achieve a unique raindrop effect by hitting a row of china mugs with a wooden spoon. She and Britten combined to collect and publish music for the recorder, in a series published by Boosey and Hawkes (1954–59),  and jointly wrote a popular introductory book, The Story of Music (1958).
  Holst continued to assist Britten with all his major compositions until 1964, at that point she determined to give priority to the final securing of her father's musical legacy, to re-establish her career as a composer, and to pursue a more independent path. She relinquished her post as Britten's assistant, while remaining personally devoted to Britten. She did not leave Aldeburgh, and continued her work with the annual Aldeburgh Festival.
caption: Benjamin Britten, photographed in the mid-1960s
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