by Ben Hogwood

On this day in 1874, composer Gustav Holst was born. Holst is of course widely celebrated for his dazzling and colourful orchestral suite The Planets, a favourite among many 20th century music collections (including my own!). However that piece – brilliant though it is – has overshadowed some of Holst’s radical compositions that combine Western and Eastern musical thinking, the latter shaped by his travels.

One of Holst’s landmark pieces, the opera Sita, has not even seen the light of day in recorded form…until now. For Sita is about to see its first release on the enterprising EM Records label, who take up the story in the following press release:

“It…almost beggars belief that Sita, Holst’s operatic masterpiece and the largest-scale work he ever composed, had not been published, recorded or even performed until 2024.

All that changed when a German opera company ⁠— ⁠the Saarländisches Staatstheater ⁠— ⁠undertook the mammoth task of transcribing and setting the manuscript and staging the work; and we at EM Records are absolutely delighted and proud to announce the World Première recording of this magnificent and captivating work, made in collaboration with the Staatstheater.

Sita took Holst seven years to compose, from 1899 to 1906, and is a substantial three-act opera based on the Hindu epic The Ramayana, telling the dramatic story of Sita’s abduction by the Demon King Ravana and the heroic efforts of Rama and his brother Lakshman to defeat the demon army and rescue her. While showing influences of Wagner and even, at times, Verdi and Mahler, it nevertheless has distinctively Holstian fingerprints, with tantalising foreshadowings of The Planets. It is a deeply moving and thrilling opera of immense beauty, poignancy and tenderness.

The new double-disc set from EM Records is issued with a separate 120-page book including full libretto, essays, composer profile and artist biographies, presented in both English and German.”

More details (and a review) will follow on Arcana in due course!

Published post no.3,023 – Monday 21 September 2026