1856–1945 · United States, United Kingdom · 20th century
Helen Hopekirk (1856–1945) was an American pianist and composer, born in Edinburgh, Scotland. She gave concerts in Europe and the United States, taught the piano, and later lived and worked in Boston. Scottish folk melodies often appear in her music.
Helen Hopekirk was born on 20 May 1856 in Portobello, Edinburgh. Her parents, Adam and Helen Hopekirk, ran a music shop. She studied music with George Lichtenstein and with the Scottish composer Alexander Mackenzie.
In 1874 she made her first appearance as a soloist, playing with the Edinburgh Amateur Orchestral Society.
Further concert successes were followed by her father's death, and Hopekirk went to Leipzig to study composition with Carl Reinecke. Her debuts in Leipzig and London were a success, and she then began regular concert tours of Europe.
William A. Wilson, an Edinburgh merchant and music critic, became Hopekirk's husband in 1882 and took on the role of her manager. Her American debut came in 1883, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and she then toured across the United States.
She had planned to go on studying with Franz Liszt, but after his death she worked instead with Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna and with the Czech composer Karel Navrátil in Prague. Until 1892 the couple made their home in Vienna; then they went to Paris, and there Hopekirk took up piano teaching. Anna Diller Starbuck and Elna Sherman were among her pupils.
Composing took up more of Hopekirk's time as the 1890s began. Her first large-scale piece was the Concertstück in D minor, a work for piano with orchestra that she wrote in Paris in 1893–94. She performed it in November 1894, in Edinburgh and in Dundee, with the Scottish Orchestra under Georg Henschel.
A traffic accident left her husband injured. In 1897 Hopekirk accepted the invitation of George Chadwick, the director, to teach at the New England Conservatory. She left in 1901 to teach privately, still giving concerts.
Her Piano Concerto in D major, a score that has since been lost, was played by her in 1900 with the Boston orchestra. American audiences first heard the Concertstück on 15–16 April 1904, when she played it with that same orchestra, led by Wilhelm Gericke; afterwards it went unplayed until 2015.
Hopekirk and her husband took American citizenship in 1918. She gave her final performance in 1939 at Steinert Hall in Boston. Her death came in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from a cerebral thrombosis, and she lies in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
Hopekirk wrote for piano, violin and orchestra, and also composed songs and piano pieces. Scottish folk melodies often find their way into her music.
Her works include the Concertstück in D minor (1893–94), written for piano with orchestra. Among the piano pieces are her arrangements of Five Scottish Folk Songs (1919) and, from 1929–30, a pair of tone-pictures: The Seal-woman’s Sea-joy and Dance to Your Shadow. Another piece, Sundown, also exists in a version for piano trio.
Hopekirk wrote songs as well. She took texts from Robert Louis Stevenson, William Sharp and Heinrich Heine. Her settings of Sharp appear in the sets Five Songs and Six Poems by Fiona Macleod, and her settings of Heine in Five Songs.