Holst: The Planets, Op. 32 - III. Mercury, the Winged Messenger

so all anyone ever really recognizes from this suite is mars and jupiter. here is movement 3, a sparkling 4 minute character piece.

holst wrote this from 1914-1916, and it premiered in september 1918 to an audience of 250 (and on short notice - the orchestra only saw the music two hours before the performance). it didn't go completely public until 1920, all the performances up to then being either semi-private or incomplete.

despite the name of the suite, it's common knowledge now that the motivation for the piece was not actually astronomic or mythological, but rather astrological - holst really liked astrology and fortunetelling, and he used a horoscope book to come up for the subtitles to all these. mercury is one of the movements for which the roman mythology coincides more or less with the astrology (a winged messenger, associated in astrology with intellect, communication, and mental facility). but saturn the bringer of old age (a god of dance, agriculture, and justice), uranus the magician (god of nothing in particular in mythology, but definitely not a magician), and neptune the mystic (god of the sea) have rather less going for them in the mythological sense.

here's a british recording for a quintessentially british piece. BBC and mackerras

this movement is fleeting and fast, like you might expect. it's scherzando, 6/8, marked vivace. pretty simple to grasp. it's basically in sonata form. the exposition has two main themes, one at the beginning, delicate ascending and desceding inversions of chords, finished off by a chromatic ascending flourish. the second is first played (after a few tries) at 0:38 by the oboes.

1:00 begins the middle section (it's actually not quite enough to call a "development"), and this middle theme is a little more dancelike, first played by a single violin. it basically gets repeated until all the orchestra is playing it, and then it dwindles back down to a single flute. then the recap, at 2:02. he takes the time to develop both themes from the first minute, until solo instruments (including a twinkling celeste) bring back all three and weave them together (or at least put them rapidly end on end).

if you really wanted to connect this to astrological properties of mercury, you definitely could, first with the speed of the movement, then with the rhythms - an incessant 6/8 or 2/4, mechanical and rapid - plus lots and lots of hemiola (listen to the middle section), cross rhythms, and orchestral relays, passing the baton of a melody seamlessly from instrument to instrument. it really leaves little to the imagination, which is one reason i think it's a popular suite - a bunch of character pieces tied up with a fairly compelling theme, even if a common misperception is that those characters are roman gods and goddesses. it works for the first four movements, which is why i suspect those have become the most well-known. i know that personally i enjoy thinking of the celeste as mercury's winged slippers.