The Morning of the Year

In a recent edition of University Challenge (1) Amol Rajan asked “Give me the composer of this piece which became, in 1927, the first musical work commissioned for the radio by the BBC.” After hearing an excerpt, which neither team identified, the answer was given: “It’s Gustav Holst with The Morning of the Year”. Needless to say I got to thinking why was this commissioned and who commissioned it, and when it was it first broadcast. Here’s what I found.

The person behind the commission was Percy Pitt, (pictured above) the BBC’s director of music. Pitt himself was a composer and conductor most notably working for the British National Opera Company in Covent Garden before joining the BBC on a full-time basis in November 1924.

In 1926 it was decided that the BBC should broadcast a series of ‘national’ classical music concerts which would ‘present important works on a scale which cannot be attempted in the ordinary concert or a studio performance’. These twelve concerts would be broadcast every two or three weeks between September 1926 and April 1927 (2) and relayed on all BBC stations live from the Royal Albert Hall. The concerts included a mix of established works and some world premieres and, in the case of Gustav Holst, a work specially commissioned for the season. Pitt and Holst had first worked together some three years earlier when as director at the Royal Opera House he had organised the premiere of Holst’s The Perfect Fool.       

Holst started work on what would be the choral ballet The Morning of the Year in November 1926. Based on a scenario by Douglas Kennedy and with words by singer Steuart Wilson (3), the music stemmed from traditional English sources and was intended to portray mating rituals in the Spring. The work would be dedicated to the English Folk Dance Society of which Kennedy was the director. 

The work received its world premiere in the tenth National Concert broadcast on Thursday 17 March 1927, though being a radio broadcast the ballet was not performed with just the music played and sung by the orchestra and chorus. Holst was quoted in the press that he considered it his most important work since The Planets but in a letter to Percy Pitt he denied this and suggested that what he actually said was that it was the best thing I’ve written in the last two years “which is a very different matter. “  

Like all the other concerts in the season the music was performed by a National Orchestra of 150 musicians. This was actually the combined forces of the Covent Garden Orchestra and the BBC’s Wireless Orchestra. For the tenth concert the orchestra was joined by the National Chorus under chorus master Stanford Robinson which comprised the London Wireless Chorus (what would become the BBC Singers) plus choristers drawn from the Civil Service Choir, Lloyd’s Choir and the Railway Clearing House Choir.

The first part of the concert was the first performance of Arthur Honegger’s King David, a symphonic psalm in three parts after the play Le Roi David by René Morx, which Honegger conducted. The second part was the premiere of The Morning of the Year with the Orchestra conducted by Holst (pictured above), followed by Honegger’s steam locomotive-inspired symphonic movement Pacific 231.

The notes in that week’s Radio Times described The Morning of the Year as ‘a representation of the mating ordained by Nature to happen in the Spring of each year’. The characters are the Headman, the Hobbyhorse, and Youths and Maidens’. It then goes on to quote the scene and story from the published foreword to the score which all sounds a little bit racy for Reith’s BBC:  

The Voice of Nature is represented by the Chorus. The singers take no part in the action.

The Scene is laid in an open clearing in the forest.

The Voice of Nature is heard calling on mankind. The Headman and Hobbyhorse, representing the human and animal worlds, enter and dance together.

Nature calls on the Youths to enter. At the conclusion of their dance and under the direction of the headman they form a moving pattern in the background. The Calling-on-Song is repeated and in response the Maidens enter. While they dance the background of Men moves independently.

This continues until the two groups become aware of one another. They hear the Voice of Nature calling them together: O Dance of Love, O Joy of Dancing! This is the Dance of My True Love.

The Mating Dance follows, and at its culmination these words are sung again.

All the couples go out with the exception of the youngest Youth and Maid, who are mated by the Headman.

The Voice of Nature is heard in the distance as the youngest couple and later the headman disappear into the forest. 

A few weeks after the BBC broadcast, in June 1927, the ballet was given a private performance at the Royal College of Music by members of the English Folk Dance Society. Again Holst was on hand to conduct. Later that month it had its first public performance at London’s New Scala Theatre on Charlotte Street.   

The critical response was mixed. “Unfortunately some of the audience expected an orgy on the lines of Le Sacre du Printemps. They did not get it. The music was austere, as usual. And, as in several of his recent works, there were times when the writing seemed calculated rather than inspired. (4) The crucial Mating Dance is rather too bland and folksy (5)

Since that 1927 concert The Morning of the Year doesn’t appear to have been broadcast again as part of a concert performance - it’s certainly not featured in any Proms concert – other than a 1956 recording by the LPO under Sir Adrian Boult that was on the Third Programme the following year. When it is played on Radio 3 it’s usually the 1982 recording made by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Atherton. There is also a 2008 recording made by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Richard Hickox.

So if The Morning of the Year was the BBC’s first commission, I wonder what the second one was!

(1) Southampton v Imperial broadcast on BBC Two 17 November 2025 

(2) The 1926-27 season of National Concerts started on 30 September 1926 and ended on 7 April 1927. There was a second season between October 1927 and April 1928 mostly from the Queens Hall just across the road from Broadcasting House. By this time the BBC had also taken over the administration of the Promenade Concerts which effectively brought the National Concerts idea to an end. 

(3) Wilson was involved in a successful libel case against the BBC when in 1933 the Radio Times published a letter criticising his performance in a broadcast of St Matthew Passion. Despite this, during World War II, he was appointed music director for the Overseas Service and in 1948 director of music for the whole BBC.     

(4) Quoted in Gustav Holst: A Biography by Imogen Holst

(5) Quoted in Gustav Holst: the man and his music by Michael Short