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Amy Beach was recognised in her lifetime as the leading American woman composer of her day. <\/p>
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 large-scale works such as a Mass, a symphony<\/a><\/strong> and a piano concerto. <\/p> All the same, her career raises the question of whether society\u2019s expectations and prejudices might have held her back from becoming not just a very good composer, but one of the greats.\u00a0<\/p> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s singing.\u00a0<\/p> But Clara, not wanting her daughter to become a spoiled prodigy, resisted all of Amy\u2019s entreaties to learn the piano. It was only when the girl was four that a visiting aunt allowed her access to the keyboard \u2013 whereupon she immediately picked out tunes and accompaniments as she had seen and heard her mother play them. <\/p> Not long afterwards, the young Amy 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.\u00a0<\/p> In 1875, not long before Amy\u2019s 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\u00a0attend 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 \u2013 one of whom, Carl Baermann, was a pupil of Franz Liszt<\/a><\/strong> and the grandson of Carl Maria von Weber<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s favourite clarinettist. <\/p> At 16 Amy made her concerto<\/a><\/strong> debut \u2013 soon to be followed by the first of many appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra \u2013 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.\u00a0<\/p> 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 music-lover and an amateur singer. The couple went to live in an elegant house on fashionable Commonwealth Avenue. <\/p> 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.\u00a0<\/p> Beach at first continued her long period of study, translating the orchestration tutors of Gevaert and Berlioz<\/a><\/strong> and memorising entire movements of symphonies in full score. Meanwhile, she was still writing songs, which won her a supportive Boston publisher \u2013 the genre was to prove a useful source of income over the years. <\/p> Her first large-scale work was a setting of the Mass for soloists, chorus and orchestra, first performed by Boston\u2019s venerable Handel and Haydn Society<\/a><\/strong> in 1892. This was followed by a Festival Jubilate<\/em> for the 1893 Chicago World\u2019s Columbian Exposition \u2013 the first of a number of pieces for similar national events. <\/p> Amy Beach then concentrated on her largest orchestral work, the Gaelic<\/em> 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 \u2018Second New England School\u2019. In a much-quoted letter, a leading member of that school, the Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick, praised the Symphony as \u2018full of fine things \u2026 and mighty well built besides\u2019, and told her that she could now be counted as \u2018one of the boys\u2019.<\/p>By the age of one, she could hum tunes accurately<\/h2>
1870s Boston: a thriving musical life<\/h2>
‘To conform with upper-crust Bostonian society, Henry instructed Amy not to teach the piano’<\/h2>
She could now be counted as ‘one of the boys’<\/h2>