Ode to Death, H.144, Op.38, is a musical composition for chorus and orchestra by English composer Gustav Holst (1874â€"1934) written in 1919. It is a setting of a passage from Walt Whitman's 1865 elegy When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd that was written to mourn the death of American president Abraham Lincoln.
After World War I, Gustav Holst turned to the last section of Whitman's elegy to mourn friends killed in the war in composing his Ode to Death (1919) for chorus and orchestra. Holst saw Whitman "as a New World prophet of tolerance and internationalism as well as a new breed of mystic whose transcendentalism offered an antidote to encrusted Victorianism." According to Sullivan, "Holst invests Whitman’s vision of “lovely and soothing death†with luminous open chords that suggest a sense of infinite space....Holst is interested here in indeterminacy, a feeling of the infinite, not in predictability and closure."
In the Ode to Death (1918â€"19), the quiet, resigned mood is seen by Matthews as an "abrupt volte-face" after the life-enhancing spirituality of the Hymn. Imogen Holst believed the Ode expressed Holst's private attitude to death. In his soundproof room at St Paul's Girls' School he composed the Ode to Death, a setting of a poem by Whitman, which according to fellow composers Vaughan Williams and composer Ernest Walker is considered by many to be Holst's most beautiful choral work.
See also
- List of compositions by Gustav Holst