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 i ...