Composer of the Month
Amy Beach left a legacy of hugely accomplished works, but, asks Anthony Burton, did the social conventions of the era in which she was living stifle her true potential?
Anthony Burton on the thwarted brilliance of Amy Beach, America’s greatest female composer
Amy Beach was recognised in her lifetime as the leading American woman composer of her day. This could have been faint praise at a time when women were widely considered intellectually incapable of creating anything more ambitious than piano salon pieces and songs. But although she wrote her fair share of those, Beach won success and respect with largescale works such as a Mass, a symphony and a piano concerto. All the same, her career raises the question of whether society’s expectations and prejudices might have held her back from becoming not just a very good composer, but one of the greats.
Amy Marcy Cheney was born in rural
New Hampshire in September 1867, with apparently innate musical gifts. From a very early age, she took a keen interest in her mother Clara’s piano playing and singing. By the age of one, she could already hum tunes accurately, always in the key in which she had first heard them; by two, she could improvise a second part to Clara’s singing.
But Clara, not wanting her daughter to become a spoiled prodigy, resisted all of Amy’s entreaties to learn the piano. It was only when the girl was four that a visiting aunt allowed her access to the keyboard – whereupon she immediately picked out tunes and accompaniments as she had seen and heard her mother play them. Not long afterwards, she was playing waltzes that she had made up in her head. By this time, the family was living in the suburbs of Boston; and after her mother had finally agreed to teach her, Amy gave her first public performances, including some of her own compositions, in a church and a private house at the age of seven.
In 1875, not long before Amy’s eighth birthday, the Cheneys moved into the centre of Boston. The city had a thriving musical life and the girl soon had the chance to attend concerts and recitals, stocking up her remarkable musical memory. She was taken to play to respected senior musicians, whose advice was that she should study the piano in Europe; but the family rejected that and signed her up with local teachers – one of whom, Carl Baermann, was a pupil of
Liszt and the grandson of Weber’s favourite clarinettist. At 16 she made her concerto debut – soon to be followed by the first of many appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra – and also had her first song published. But when her family consulted the conductor of the Boston Symphony, Wilhelm Gericke, about obtaining composition tuition, his advice was that she should make her own study of the great masters.
In 1885, the 18-year-old Amy married a 42-year-old widower, Dr Henry Beach, a respected Boston surgeon and Harvard University lecturer who was also a musiclover and an amateur singer. The couple went to live in an elegant house on fashionable Commonwealth Avenue. To conform with the tenets of upper-crust Bostonian society, Henry persuaded (or instructed) Amy not to teach the piano, and to curtail her performing career, restricting her public appearances to a handful of concerts a year, including an annual recital in Boston, and donating all her fees to charity. He did at least encourage her to pursue her vocation as a composer, though henceforward all her works were to be performed and published under her married name of Mrs HHA Beach.
Beach at first continued her long period of study, translating the orchestration tutors of Gevaert and Berlioz and memorising entire movements of symphonies in full score. Meanwhile, she was still writing songs, which won her a supportive Boston publisher – the genre was to prove a useful source of income over the years. Her first large-scale work
Beach was told that she could now be counted as ‘one of the boys’
was a setting of the Mass for soloists, chorus and orchestra, first performed by Boston’s venerable Handel and Haydn Society in 1892. This was followed by a Festival Jubilate for the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition – the first of a number of pieces for similar national events. She then concentrated on her largest orchestral work, the Gaelic Symphony, premiered by the Boston Symphony
Orchestra in 1896. Rapidly repeated in several other cities, it was a success with the public and most of the critics, and established her as a major figure in the so-called ‘Second New England School’. In a much-quoted letter, a leading member of that school, the Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick, praised the Symphony as ‘full of fine things … and mighty well built besides’, and told her that she could now be counted as ‘one of the boys’.
Now in the heyday of her composing career, but still constrained as a pianist by her agreement with her husband, Beach took care to write works which would give her opportunities to perform. She wrote a Sonata for violin and piano in 1896, her most substantial solo piano piece, the Variations
on Balkan Themes, in 1904, and a Piano Quintet in 1907. Most importantly, she composed a four-movement Piano Concerto, in which she took the virtuoso solo part at the premiere with the Boston Symphony and Wilhelm Gericke in 1900 and on many subsequent occasions.
Dr Henry Beach died of complications following a fall in 1910 (and Beach’s other protective mentor, her mother, died the next year). After a period of grieving, Amy set out for Europe, where she made Munich her base. She combined tourism with gaining endorsement in Germany as a performer and a composer: she was especially gratified by the success of her Symphony and Concerto in Hamburg, where a critic praised her as ‘a possessor of musical gifts of the highest kind, a musical nature touched with genius’. She extended her visit several times, but was eventually forced by the outbreak of the First World War to sail back to the US.
On her return, she resumed her career as a pianist, making extensive concert tours of the eastern seaboard, the Mid-west and California. She continued to compose: a substantial set of Variations for flute and string quartet was premiered in San Francisco
Beach was revered as the dean of American women composers
in 1916. And meanwhile, there were revivals of some of her major works, including the Symphony, which Leopold Stokowski conducted twice in Philadelphia. After initially retaining her base in Boston, she moved in 1916 to a new home in her native New Hampshire. But from 1921 she spent several weeks each summer at the Macdowell Colony, a retreat in the woodlands for creative artists. There she concentrated on composing, writing among other things a pair of piano pieces based on transcriptions of the singing of the hermit thrush and a harmonically adventurous String Quartet.
In 1930, she moved her winter base to
New York, where she rented a studio at the American Women’s Association and became a worshipper at St Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, regularly composing music for its choir. She spent much of each summer at the Macdowell Colony and at an isolated country cottage that she had once shared with her husband. During her later years, she was revered as the dean of American women composers, held titles in several national musical organisations and was the object of celebrations everywhere up to and including the White House; but privately she was also a friendly ‘Aunt Amy’ to a generation of young women musicians. She continued to compose a variety of works, including a chamber opera,
Cabildo, in 1932 and a Piano Trio in 1938. Illness slowed her up only slightly in the years before her death in 1944.
Beach’s musical legacy, neglected in the years after her death but largely revived in recent decades through reprints, recordings and a biography by Adrienne Fried Block (Amy
Beach, Passionate Victorian), was substantial, comprising over 150 opus numbers. There are numerous piano pieces and songs, much church music, other choral works, some with orchestra (though it’s not clear whether the orchestrations survive), the chamber opera and a handful of chamber and orchestral works. The reasons for the length of this list are clear. Beach wrote with impressive fluency: she said that she could produce a song in a day. And, unlike many women composers, she was unencumbered by motherhood or by domestic duties: she was cared for all her life by family, servants (during her marriage) and later a small army of friends and relations.
Nevertheless, some questions arise. Was she too preoccupied by her concert-giving, and later by her social obligations (both private and public), to follow up on the success of her major works? Where are the further symphonies, concertos and chamber works – not to mention the piano sonatas – that might have won her a place among the great composers? Instead of her years of self-teaching, would composition lessons with a good tutor have helped her find a personal style and develop more securely as a professional composer?
A fundamental question underlies these: how much was any failure to build on her extraordinary talent the result of society’s view that greatness, or ambition, or even professionalism, was not something that should be expected from a woman composer? Beach herself, at the end of her life, dismissed all such considerations, saying: ‘My work has always been judged from the beginning by work as such, not according to sex. The question has rarely ever been raised. I have always tried to do the best possible in my creative work, and devote the same attention to the small as well as the large work.’
So perhaps we would do better to give up hypothetical questions, and simply celebrate the outstanding achievement of a remarkable musician.