Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979), as a woman, had to endure an enormous number of challenges and setbacks but her perseverance, professional dedication, and brilliance led her to become one of the important astrophysicists in the 20th century. In her 1925 Ph.D. thesis, Cecilia Payne demonstrated that stars are primarily composed of hydrogen and helium. This was highly controversial at the time, but she was eventually proved correct. In 1960, the noted astronomer Otto Struve called her 1925 thesis, Stellar Atmospheres; A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.” Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin would make an excellent subject for a full-length documentary as well as a biographical movie, and it is disgraceful that neither has been done yet.
I recently completed teaching a new five-week course on the English composer Gustav Holst (1874-1934). The research I did for that course plus my lifelong interest in astrophysics naturally led me to take an interest in the relationship between Cecilia Payne and Gustav Holst. Clearly from what you will see below, they had profound respect and admiration for each other.
Cecilia Payne attended St. Paul’ Girls’ School, where Gustav Holst taught, during the 1918-1919 school year. However, Holst left for war service in Salonika, Greece on October 29, 1918 and didn’t return to St. Paul’s until the 1919-1920 school year, after Payne had graduated and gone on to the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England.
Frances Ralph Gray was the founding “high mistress” of St. Paul’s School for Girls in the Brook Green neighborhood of London…Like Cecilia, she adored music; unlike Cecilia, she had had great difficulty learning mathematics. Also unlike Cecilia, she was small in stature. She was, however, commanding in presence. Students reported that being sent to see Miss Gray “was their greatest fear.”
Frances perceived that there was something different about the seventeen-year-old girl in her office who so wanted to be admitted. Yes, Cecilia had been told to leave her current school, but not because she was disruptive or a problem learner—quite the opposite. She was a serious student who loved music and science, whose goal was to go to Cambridge. She had responded to Elizabeth Edwards and to Dorothy Daglish. If St. Paul’s had similar teachers who could recognize Cecilia’s love of learning and would take time to nurture her, surely she would be a good fit.
Years later, in a touching letter recommending Cecilia for a fellowship at Harvard, Frances wrote: “It is not my practice to admit girls who have reached the age at which Cecilia Payne was admitted [age seventeen], but I was requested to make an exception in her case by the headmistress of the School she had previously attended, who assured me that she was a girl of very unusual promise.”
Unbeknownst to Cecilia, St. Paul’s needed her as much as she needed the school. Founded just over a decade earlier by the Worshipful Company of Mercers, it prided itself on consistently outperforming other schools. The “Paulinas” were not viewed as, or trained to be, socialites; this was a serious school. The social snobbery of other private schools had no place here.
Cecilia described her move to St. Paul’s as stepping from medieval times into the modern day. Instead of chapels there were laboratories—in biology, chemistry, physics—and teachers who were specialists. Here she was not just “allowed” to study science; she was encouraged. She only attended the school for one year. But from the moment she approached the Queen Anne-style pink brick building and walked up the stone steps and through the marble and oak arched front door, she was home.1
Donovan Moore goes on now to write about Holst.
Frances Gray…made good on her professed love of music when she hired Gustav Holst. Holst was a relatively unknown trombone player when he accepted the job of director of music at St. Paul’s. Like Cecilia, he was shy and reserved, and he disdained fame. And like Cecilia, he was practiced in overcoming obstacles: neuritis in his right arm had forced him to stop playing the trombone and the piano, so he had to turn to composing.
Frances encouraged him; in fact, she worked with him, supplying the text for both a light-hearted masked dance in 1909 and a more ambitious orchestra work three years later. She had an entire music wing built in 1913, including a large soundproof room where Gustav composed on Sundays, when the school was locked up, in silence and solitude. It was in this room that he wrote his most famous work, the orchestra suite The Planets. Cecilia was among a group of students who heard it performed shortly after it was composed.2
As we shall see later through Cecilia’s own words, she must have heard some sort of run-through of The Planets at St. Paul’s. I wonder whether she was among the invited audience of about 250 people who attended the first performance of The Planets at Queen’s Hall, London, on Sunday, September 29, 1918, with Adrian Boult conducting the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra? Given that the choir for “Neptune: The Mystic” in that performance was comprised, in whole or in part, of students from St. Paul’s, it is possible she was present for the Queen’s Hall performance though perhaps unlikely given that the audience consisted of close friends and associates of Holst and many professional musicians in London.
Holst was also a great teacher. For three decades—from 1905 until his death in 1934—”Gussie”, as he was known, would cast his musical spell over his students. The contemporary composer Ralph Vaughan Williams described Holst’s long tenure at St. Paul’s: “He did away with the childish sentimentality that schoolgirls were supposed to appreciate and substituted Bach and Vittoria; a splendid background for immature minds.”
Holst discerned Cecilia’s love of music. He asked her to play her violin for him, made her a member of the school’s orchestra, and taught her how to conduct. He encouraged her to become a musician but did not prevail. Cecilia instinctively felt that a career in music would control her; as a scientist, she would be in control.3
In her autobiography, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin writes of St. Paul’s, Holst, and music:
The school ministered to my twin loves, science and music. Here I came under the spell of Gustav Holst, or “Gussie” as we affectionately called him. Aside from my shadowy Father, and my schoolboy brother, he was the first man I ever knew. He radiated music; the organ in the great hall reverberated to the great Toccata and fugue of Bach. Here for the first time I heard The Planets (then newly composed) and took part in a performance of the Hymn of Jesus. He was like a father to us, shy, abrupt and charming. He was quick to learn of my love of music, asked me to play the violin to him, and urged me to become a musician. I played in the orchestra, and learned conducting from him, but my love of science triumphed. It seems odd to think that the only career I was ever encouraged to follow was that of a musician. As a student at Cambridge I trained and conducted a choir that won an award. One of the judges told me that my conducting had been the decisive factor, and that my future lay there. Indeed, the feelings evoked by conducting a choir or orchestra are so powerful as to be overwhelming, but I recoiled instinctively from something I felt would control me; as a scientist I should be in control of my material. Who knows whether I was right?4
St. Paul’s Girls’ School did indeed have a great hall with an organ, so one wonders how Cecilia Payne heard The Planets there. It is also interesting that she first heard The Hymn of Jesus at St. Paul’s during her 1918-1919 school year, as the first known performance was on March 10, 1920 at the Royal College of Music with Holst conducting. Though Holst began composing the work during the summer of 1917, it was apparently not completed until after he returned from war service in Salonika, Greece on June 29, 1919. Cecilia Payne must have heard an early version of the work, or a part of it that had been completed.
Following four years at the University of Cambridge, Cecilia Payne arrived in New York aboard the RMS Laconia on Thursday, September 20, 1923, and from there proceeded to Cambridge, Massachusetts to begin her work in astronomy at Harvard University. Just a few months earlier, Gustav & Isobel Holst had visited the United States from April 27 through June 12, 1923. This was Isobel Holst’s only visit to the U.S., but Gustav would make two more visits, in 1929 and again in 1932.
Gustav Holst was in the United States from April 16-27, 1929, and on the evening of Friday, April 26, 1929, Holst gave a well-received lecture at Harvard University. It seems likely that Cecilia Payne would have attended that lecture and visited with Holst, but he was only in Cambridge for a day and had to take an early morning train to New York to board the RMS Samaria for the trip back to England. I have not been able to find any evidence that indicates they saw each other during Holst’s 1929 American visit.
Nor have I found any evidence that Cecilia Payne visited Holst in England after she moved to the United States in 1923, though New York ship passenger records show she arrived in New York from Southampton, England aboard the SS Leviathan on September 21, 1925, aboard the SS Berengaria on January 3, 1929, and aboard the SS Bremen on October 7, 1931 and August 30, 1933.
Gustav Holst and Cecilia Payne did meet again in 1932, when Holst conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the first of two concerts in Symphony Hall in Boston.
After the concert Holst met Mrs. Arthur Foote and Cecilia Payne, a St. Paul’s Girls’ School alumna, who was studying astronomy.5
This would have been Friday, January 22, 1932, during Holst’s final visit to America. The all-Holst concert was at 2:30 p.m. and featured St. Paul’s Suite; Prelude and Scherzo, “Hammersmith” (Boston premiere); and the Ballet from the Opera, The Perfect Fool (Boston premiere); followed by an intermission and then The Planets. Here is the concert program courtesy of the Internet Archive which includes pages from the previous program suggesting that a last-minute program change occurred substituting St. Paul’s Suite for Somerset Rhapsody (an excellent early work by Holst, by the way) and switching the order of Hammersmith and The Perfect Fool:
Incidentally, you might notice from the program that Arthur Fiedler was a violist in the orchestra and prepared the women’s chorus for the final movement of The Planets.
I met one ex Paulina at Harvard—Cecilia Payne who is doing research in astronomy.6
This is from a letter that Holst began on Tuesday, January 26, 1932 to his daughter Imogen.
He also spent some time with ex-Paulina Cecilia Payne, meeting her for lunch one day and for dinner at her place on another. This was followed by her lecture on a subject of great interest to him, the Zodiac.7
This was after Holst returned to Harvard from his four-day trip to Montreal and New York, and before his lecture at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., thus sometime between Tuesday, March 15 and Saturday, March 26, 1932.
Holst’s train from Ann Arbor arrived at Boston’s South Station at 11:15 a.m. on Saturday, May 21st. The next two days were spent packing and writing letters. He met with the Davisons the following morning and had dinner with Cecilia Payne at the Faculty Club that same evening.8
This dinner with Cecilia Payne would have been the evening of Sunday, May 22, 1932.
Later that same evening, Cecilia Payne drove Holst over to the observatory to view Jupiter and a star cluster. Holst enjoyed her company and visited with her again the day of his Boston departure.9
The observatory visit would have been on Tuesday, May 24. I’m guessing that the star cluster they observed after Jupiter would have been M13 in Hercules, which that evening was high in the eastern sky. Holst’s last visit with Cecilia Payne was on Thursday, May 26, 1932. Later that day, he left Boston by boat for New York where he boarded the SS Europa the following day to return to England. This was the last time Holst and Payne saw each other.
Cecilia Payne first met Russian-born astrophysicist Sergei Gaposchkin at the Astronomische Gesellschaft (Astronomical Society) meeting in Göttingen, Germany, on August 4, 1933. She helped him emigrate to the United States, and they were married on March 5, 1934. Less than three months later, Gustav Holst would be dead.
- Moore, Donovan. 2020. What Stars Are Made of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. London, England: Harvard University Press, pp. 34-35. ↩︎
- Moore, pp. 37-38. ↩︎
- Moore, p. 38. ↩︎
- Haramundanis, Katherine. 1984. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, p. 108. ↩︎
- Mitchell, Jon C. 2001. A Comprehensive Biography of Composer Gustav Holst, with Correspondence and Diary Excerpts: Including His American Years. New York, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, p. 442. ↩︎
- Mitchell, p. 447. ↩︎
- Mitchell, p. 485. ↩︎
- Mitchell, p. 543. ↩︎
- Mitchell, p. 547. ↩︎
