Jane Joseph
Jane Joseph was born on 31 May 1894 at 23 Clanricarde Gardens, in the Notting Hill district of the Borough of Kensington, London, to a prosperous Jewish family.
George Joseph had a deep interest in music, which he passed on to his children; two sons, Frank (1881–1944) and Edwin (1887–1975), became competent string players, while Jane learned piano (she took her first examination at the age of seven) and later, double-bass.
[5] Its high mistress, Frances Ralph Gray, was a formidable figure with traditional views about female education,[6] who nevertheless provided a lively and varied learning environment in which Joseph excelled.
Apart from her academic successes, Joseph played double-bass in the school orchestra,[2] gave an acclaimed piano performance of Bach's D minor keyboard concerto, began to compose, and won a prize for sight-reading.
After leaving the Royal College of Music in 1898 Holst had earned his living as an organist, and as a trombonist in various orchestras, while awaiting critical recognition as a composer.
He became a music teacher, initially at the James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich;[9] in 1905 he was recommended to Frances Gray by Adine O'Neill, a former pupil of Clara Schumann, who taught piano at SPGS.
[10] He was first appointed on a part-time basis to teach singing, and later extended his activities to cover the school's wider music curriculum including conducting and composition.
She also sang alto in the society's choir, and may have participated in a performance of Berlioz's La damnation de Faust that was praised in the Cambridge Review of 17 June 1914.
Overextended by his teaching duties and other commitments, Holst required assistance in the task of organising his music for publication and performance, and used a group of young women volunteers—his "scribes"—to make fair copies of his scores, write out instrumental or vocal parts, or prepare piano arrangements.
In the autumn of 1916 she began teaching at Eothen, a small private school for girls in Caterham, founded and run by the Misses Catharine and Winifred Pye.
[19] At first she played the double-bass, but later took French horn lessons, possibly from Adolph Borsdorf;[20] later still, at very short notice, she taught herself the timpani part for a summer concert.
On 27 May the following year, just after the Whitsun festival, her brother William was killed in action on the western front; in September, Edwin was severely wounded in the final Allied offensive of the war.
[30] The purpose of the lessons was to enable her to conduct her orchestral work Bergamask, which was performed at the Coliseum Theatre under a scheme devised by Sir Oswald Stoll to showcase new British music.
[30] Towards the end of 1918 Holst had asked Joseph to provide a libretto for his opera The Perfect Fool, feeling that she might possess the required light touch that he thought his own writing lacked.
[22] Meantime, Joseph's works were being performed at SWM concerts: two songs, probably from her Mirage cycle, in January 1920, and some of her settings of Walter de la Mare poems in December.
Joseph's part in this event is unrecorded, but she made a major contribution to the following year's festivities, which began beside the Thames at Isleworth and concluded on Whit Monday at SPGS in the gardens of Bute House.
Writing of the occasion after Joseph's death, Holst recalled that she had woven Purcell's music and Thomas Betterton's text, both long neglected, "into a delightful out-door pageant founded on a fairy story, complete with lost princess, dragon and princely hero".
[36] Throughout this considerable organisational task, Holst wrote, "Jane gave the minimum of worry to each person concerned by giving herself the maximum of hard work and forethought".
[40] The Venite was performed on 13 June 1923 at the Queen's Hall, by the Philharmonic Choir under Charles Kennedy Scott; the Spectator's critic thought it a "very notable addition to modern British music".
[43] On 12 October 1922, Vaughan Williams's 50th birthday, Joseph organised a choir which gave an early-morning surprise performance in the composer's garden of a song she had written to mark the occasion.
[45] When following a physical breakdown in 1923 Holst gave up his duties at Morley College, Joseph wrote him a supportive letter congratulating him on his decision which would enable him to concentrate on composition.
[51] By this time the Joseph home in Kensington, where Jane lived for her whole life, was becoming a recognised musical gathering-place; a visitor recalled meeting Vaughan Williams, Boult, and the harpist Sidonie Goossens there, among others.
[45] In 1926 Joseph provided Holst with the libretto for his choral ballet The Golden Goose, based on a story by the Brothers Grimm,[52] and arranged its first performance at the 1926 Whitsun festival, held at the James Allen school.
[53][54] Joseph also assisted Holst and the librettist Steuart Wilson in the production of a second choral ballet, The Morning of the Year—the first work commissioned by the BBC's newly formed music department—which was performed at the Royal Albert Hall in March 1927.
[12] No Whitsun festival was held in 1929, but in early July, at an open-air production of Holst's The Golden Goose at Warwick Castle, a special performance of his St Paul's Suite was played in Joseph's memory.
[62] Over the course of the next few years Joseph's works were played at concerts and events organised by Morley College, the SWM, SPGS and the English Folk Dance Society.
[2] The music writer Philip Scowcroft praises Joseph's confident handling of the sizeable orchestral forces required for the Morris Dance, while the composer Havergal Brian, Holst's contemporary, found Bergamask "exhilarating" and "full of promise".
[64] Gibbs suggests that these two works presage Holst's late choral ballets, and comments: "That these carefree pieces did not find a permanent place in the repertory is unfortunate".
Gibbs highlights the first in the cycle, "Song", which initially echoes "To Varuna" from Holst's Rig Veda hymns, but evolves into "a different creation, distinguished by its own uncluttered quartet writing in which the viola has a special part to play".
[64] These were published between 1920 and 1925; Gibbs writes that these pieces "focus on technical aspects in tuneful and often modal contexts", with occasional excursions into other forms such as chaconne and rondo.
