The Planets debuted privately in 1918 as a present to Holst from his friend Balfour Gardiner. Adrian Boult conducted the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra for this informal event. The official premiere of the complete work took place in Birmingham in 1920, and the audience thrilled to the work’s groundbreaking sonorities. The Planets became an immediate hit.

Surprisingly, Holst never regarded the piece as his best work, and felt that his other compositions were unjustly overshadowed. Nevertheless, the suite is the composer’s best-known work, and it remains the single most frequently performed British work of the 20th century.

The only thing missing from this magnificent orchestral tour de force is a movement devoted to the recently derailed caboose of the planetary train, Pluto. That’s because the tiny planet was not discovered until 1930, only four years before Holst’s death and about 14 years after he wrote the suite. As fate would have it, a commission from Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra requested that the British composer Colin Matthews step up to the challenge in 2000. The resulting composition that completed Holst’s celestial work was a companion piece titled Pluto—The Renewer.

In an ironic twist, in late August, the International Astronomical Union, the governing authority over celestial bodies, downgraded the status of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet, and it has now been designated asteroid number 134340.

So thanks to this recent turn of events, Holst’s planetary suite is once again a complete work. How prescient.