Amy Beach

Although she had no children of her own, Amy Beach can be considered the spiritual mother of generations of women composers. Recognized as a gifted musician from childhood, she was simultaneously encouraged in her musical pursuits and limited by the constraints of Victorian-era social and gender norms. The only child of a prominent New England family, she became known as a piano prodigy but was denied the chance for advanced study in Europe or a touring career. As a young wife, she agreed to limit public performances, turning instead to composition, which her husband encouraged. Beach continued a self-propelled musical education, and her stature as a composer grew. She became the first woman to have a symphony performed by a US orchestra; numerous commissions followed, placing her among the top rank of American composers. Performances of her music declined after her death, but Amy Beach and her works have been rediscovered in recent decades, and she has become the subject of scholarly studies on the role of women composers past and present.

Early Years

Born on September 5, 1867, in Henniker, New Hampshire, Amy Marcy Cheney showed remarkable learning and musical abilities from the start. She reportedly could sing dozens of songs by her first birthday, taught herself to read by age three, and started improvising tunes soon after. Her mother—an accomplished pianist and singer—and father determined that she had perfect pitch, and perhaps synesthesia, as she often requested music by color.

The family moved to the Boston area in 1875, and Amy’s piano lessons with her mother were replaced by studies with Ernst Perabo and Carl Baermann (a student of Liszt). Recognizing her talent, they suggested studies in Europe, which, at the time, were considered an essential step for serious musicians. Her parents declined, believing that Amy should focus on future home and social duties. They also declined offers of concert tours from managers who had heard her perform around Boston.

Those appearances were not slight. Amy made her debut at the Boston Music Hall in 1883 and performed Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1885. She also had a year of study in harmony and counterpoint which would turn out to be her only formal education in composition.

Middle Period: Marriage and Composing Success

In 1885, 18-year-old Amy married Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a Boston surgeon and widower, and took the name by which her music would be published: “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.” Henry, 25 years her senior, set the conditions that she limit public performances to two a year, and that any concerts she did play be for charitable causes, as befitted the wife of her social status. At the same time, he was a music aficionado and encouraged his wife’s composing. Settling in with the trove of books and scores she had been collecting, Amy embarked on her own continuing education program. She pored over and memorized orchestral scores, approaching them, she once said, like a medical student’s dissection.

Breakthroughs came in 1892, when Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society performed her Mass in E-flat major and the New York Symphony Orchestra premiered her aria Eilende Wolken. It was the first time either group had performed music written by a woman. Soon she was getting commissions such as Festival Jubilate for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893). She gained real prominence with the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiere of her Gaelic Symphony in 1896.

Late Period: Achievements

Henry and Amy had no children, and in 1910 she found herself alone after his death and, a few months later, her mother’s. In mourning, she traveled to Europe, and, after a time, began performing again. In 1912 she made her European concert debut in Dresden, performing her Sonata for Violin and Piano with violinist “Dr. Bülau.” Enthusiastic responses to subsequent appearances sparked an interest in her published works, and she remained in Europe until 1914 and the onset of the First World War.

After returning to New Hampshire, Beach split her time between there and New York City, where she became the de facto composer-in-residence at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church. She also began spending summers at the MacDowell Colony of artists in New Hampshire, becoming acquainted with other women composers and working with younger musicians.

She remained active until 1940, when the effects of heart disease prompted her retirement. She died in New York City on December 27, 1944. 

Legacy

Amy Beach composed more than 300 works, most of which are art songs, vocal works, chamber music, and solo piano pieces of late-Romantic style. She has become recognized as a trailblazer who did not let the confines of her times minimize her work—a self-taught composer who made her mark internationally despite the perceived handicap of lacking a European conservatory education. Her influence later extended through teaching and articles guiding young composers in performance preparation. She was president of the Society of American Women Composers and helped establish numerous “Beach Clubs,” where her music and that of other women was performed.

Watch and Listen

Inevitably, Amy Beach is identified first with the large-scale work that cemented her fame, the Gaelic Symphony. Often viewed as a response to Dvořák’s use of American idioms in his New World Symphony of 1893, Beach’s Gaelic Symphony incorporates Irish folk tunes and dances, reflecting the immigrant community of Boston, where it premiered. Yet, her chamber and piano works are the most performed today. Her Quintet in F-sharp minor, Op. 67 (1907) and Sonata for Violin and Piano in A minor, Op. 34 (1896), are considered important markers in American chamber music. Each displays a deep well of late-Romantic emotion and references Beach’s predecessors, such as Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms, while advancing into a more modern tonality. Also notable is the Romance for Violin and PIano, Op. 23, written for the violinist Maud Powell, another woman who was making a mark with major ensembles. They presented it at the Women’s Music Congress during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893; the work unfolds as an exchange between instruments with equally demanding parts.

In Beach’s Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor, Op. 45 (1898–99), there is more tension than dialogue between soloist and orchestra—, with the piano increasingly dominating in virtuosic passages. She premiered it with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1900. Her most ambitious solo work for piano was Variations on Balkan Themes, Op. 60, written in 1904, when revolts in the region over Ottoman rule were in the news, and based on the folk melodies Beach learned from missionaries who had visited there. Her continuing interest in other cultures is seen in the later Quartet for Strings in One Movement, Op. 89 (1921–29), which builds on Inuit themes in an exploration of dissonance.

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