Holst In the Bleak Midwinter

The great composer of The Planets Gustav Holst also taught himself Sanskrit lived in a street of brothels in Algiers cycled into the Sahara Desert and allied himself during the First World War with a red priest who pinned on the door of his church prayers at noon for the victims of Imperial Aggression He hated the words used to his most famous tune I Vow to Thee My Country because it was the opposite of what he believed and died before the age of 60 broken and disillusioned