1867–1944 · United States · 20th century
Amy Beach (1867–1944) was an American pianist and composer, the first American woman to succeed as a composer. She belonged to a circle of Boston composers known as the Boston Six, who made a major contribution to shaping American musical life. Beach debuted as a pianist and appeared with an orchestra as a teenager.
Amy Marcy Cheney came into the world on September 5, 1867, in the New Hampshire town of Henniker, into a well-off family. She was the great-niece of the publicist Oren Burbank Cheney, founder of Bates College. Her mother, Clara Imogene Marcy Cheney, was herself a capable pianist and singer and began teaching her daughter music from early childhood — and the girl showed remarkable ability from the start: family recollections say that by the age of one she could accurately sing about forty songs, and she taught herself to read at the age of three. At four, while spending the summer on her grandfather's farm near West Henniker, where there was no piano, she composed three waltzes in her head and played them as soon as she got home.
Systematic piano lessons with her mother began when Amy turned six, and she was soon appearing in public, playing pieces by Handel, Beethoven and Chopin next to her own compositions. One such recital drew a review in the arts journal The Folio, and several agents suggested concert tours for the young performer — her parents turned the offers down, a decision Amy herself was later grateful for.
The Cheney family relocated to Boston in 1875. There, piano teachers were engaged for Amy: first Ernst Perabo, then Carl Baermann, who had once been a pupil of Franz Liszt himself. In 1881, at age fourteen, she also spent a year on harmony and counterpoint lessons with Junius Welch Hill — the only formal composition training she ever received: after that she taught herself theory, composition and orchestration from books, even rendering the French orchestration treatises of Gevaert and Berlioz into English for her own use.
On October 18, 1883, sixteen-year-old Amy Cheney made her concert debut with an orchestra in Boston's Music Hall, at a 'Promenade Concert' led by Adolph Neuendorff: she played Chopin's Rondo in E-flat major and was soloist in Moscheles's Third Piano Concerto, earning enthusiastic reviews from the critics. Over the following two years she performed at Chickering Hall and closed out the Boston Symphony's 1884–85 season.
In 1885 Amy married the 42-year-old Boston surgeon Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, who lectured at Harvard and sang as an amateur. At her husband's request she almost entirely stopped performing in public and concentrated on composing, signing her works with his name preceded by 'Mrs.' — 'Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.' Beach allowed her one public concert a year.
A notable success was her Mass in E-flat major: in 1892 it was performed by the orchestra of the Handel and Haydn Society, which, since its founding in 1815, had never before performed a work by a woman composer. After this, music critics began calling Beach one of America's leading composers, comparing the Mass to works by Cherubini and Bach.
On October 30, 1896, the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave a highly successful premiere of her 'Gaelic' Symphony, making Beach the first American woman to have composed and published a symphony. Alongside her, the circle of composers later called the Boston Six included Arthur Foote, George Chadwick, Horatio Parker, John Knowles Paine and Edward MacDowell: this group is considered to have made a significant contribution to the development of American classical music. In 1900 the same orchestra gave the first performance of her Piano Concerto, with Beach herself as soloist.
Beach's husband died in June 1910, and seven months later her mother died too; the couple had no children. For a while Amy was unable to work, and then went to Europe hoping to recover, where she began performing under the name 'Amy Beach,' giving up the signature 'Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.' She was accompanied on the trip by the American soprano Marcella Craft, the reigning prima donna at Berlin's Royal Opera. Beach's European debut took place in Dresden in October 1912, where she performed her Violin and Piano Sonata to favourable reviews.
In January 1913 she gave a concert in Munich, again playing her Violin Sonata and several of her songs alongside solo piano pieces by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; the critics' response was mixed, but demand for Beach's sheet music grew so much that her publisher, Arthur P. Schmidt, could not keep up supplying German music shops. That same November and December, Beach herself took the piano part in her own Piano Concerto, performed with orchestras in Leipzig, Hamburg and Berlin, while her 'Gaelic' Symphony was heard in Hamburg and Leipzig as well.
Beach returned to the United States in 1914, not long after the outbreak of the First World War, and settled mainly in New York, although from 1916 her official residence was the town of Hillsborough, New Hampshire. In 1915, when the Panama–Pacific International Exposition opened in San Francisco to mark the opening of the Panama Canal, concerts of Beach's music were given in her honour several times, and she was commissioned to write a 'Panama Hymn' for the celebrations.
With royalties from one of her most successful early songs, 'Ecstasy' (1892), Beach bought a plot of land in Centerville on Cape Cod and built a cottage there, where she spent summers composing. From 1921 she spent long summer stretches at the MacDowell Colony, working in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and there she became close to other American women composers — Mabel Wheeler Daniels, Marion Bauer, Emilie Frances Bauer and others. Beach was also active in music education: she served on the New England Conservatory's Board of Councillors and gave guidance to younger composers. The Society of American Women Composers elected her its founding president in 1925, and in 1928 the University of New Hampshire made her an honorary Master of Arts.
Heart disease led Beach to give up concert performing in 1940; on this occasion two hundred of her friends held a testimonial dinner in her honour in New York. Amy Beach died in New York City on December 27, 1944, and is buried beside her husband in Forest Hills Cemetery in the Jamaica Plain neighbourhood of Boston.
Beach belonged to what is known as the Second New England School, a circle of Boston composers active around the turn of the twentieth century. Her music is written mainly in a Romantic idiom that critics compared to Brahms and Rachmaninoff; in her later works she moved away from conventional tonality, experimenting with whole-tone scales and bolder harmonies. Unlike most of her peers, she reached this recognition as an American composer without any period of study in Europe, and she toured widely as a pianist, performing her own music on both sides of the Atlantic. Her works include a one-act opera, Cabildo, a symphony, a piano concerto, a mass, chamber ensembles and many songs.
Her large-scale works include the 'Gaelic' Symphony from 1896 and a Piano Concerto written in the key of C-sharp minor around 1898–99; there is also Bal masqué, an orchestral piece that likewise survives in a solo-piano arrangement. Her chamber output includes a string quartet, a piano quintet, a piano trio, a violin sonata and several shorter pieces for violin and piano. Over her lifetime she published more than 300 works spanning nearly every genre, though the largest share are art songs and vocal chamber works, above all her roughly 150 songs. As early as the beginning of the 1890s Beach developed an interest in folk melodies and wrote about thirty songs based on Scottish, Irish, Balkan, African-American and Native American tunes. Beach premiered her early Violin Sonata, Op. 34, with Franz Kneisel in 1897, and later, during a 1916–17 tour with the Kneisel Quartet, played her Quintet, Op. 67, in Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago and Philadelphia.
On the site, Beach's sheet music is represented mainly by songs for voice and piano, a genre in which she was especially prolific. Among them is 'The Year's at the Spring' from the Three Browning Songs, arguably her best-known composition. There are also songs in German and French — 'Ich sagte nicht,' 'Wir drei,' 'Juni,' 'Je demande à l'oiseau' — and in English — 'Take, O Take those Lips Away,' 'O Mistress Mine,' 'Fairy Lullaby,' 'Ah, Love, but a Day!,' 'I Send My Heart up to Thee!' Half are rated Intermediate+, and the other half Advanced, so it is easy to start exploring Beach's music with any of the earlier ones before moving on to the more demanding pieces.