Amy Beach was a remarkable woman by any measure. Without doubt she was this country’s first woman to have carved out an acclaimed musical career that equaled that of any important American male musician, and transcended most. She enjoyed a noteworthy life as a piano virtuoso, composer, and influential leader in music education, public music advocacy, and music journalism. But it was as a prolific and highly respected composer of the first water that she made her historical mark in American classical music. Simply put, she was our county’s first outstanding female composer. At the time of her early years, American classical music was still very much simply an outpost of Europe, European musicians, and European musical traditions. Our symphony orchestras were populated largely by Germans, French, and Italians and musical composition by American composers was in its infancy. A group centered around Boston and Harvard University, known later as the “Second New England School,” constituted the country’s initial efforts as an independent, internationally respected thrust in serious music composition. The names are still familiar to many (but mostly to musicians): George Chadwick, John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, Edward McDowell, and Horatio Parker. And in this all-male list of names is that of Amy Beach. Moreover, her membership was acknowledged in the contemporary stuffy times of Boston! While the music critics and pundits of those times characteristically simply could not resist couching much of their responses to her work in gender obsessed language, they never doubted her brilliance and talent. She was, perhaps grudging, acknowledged as “one of the boys.”
The details of her life, living as she did in public scrutiny, are well known. But even under today’s close examination, she doesn’t fit any of our contemporary clichés and memes of cultural, political, and gender wars. On the one hand she seems to have been stultified by nineteenth-century mores, social conventions, and marital norms. On the other she refused to see herself as constrained and repressed. She may have been a pioneer in championing women’s pursuit of equality, but she was by today’s standards a decided conservative. She always voted Republican, hated FDR, happily went by the name of her husband on her published compositions (Mrs. HHA Beach), dallied with admiration of Mussolini during her Italian sojourn, and other than her determined efforts for musical equality, was not a poster child for liberal causes.
Amy Cheney was born in 1867 in a very small town near the center of New Hampshire, and her astounding musical talents were evident almost from the beginning. Obviously a prodigy, she was singing songs at the age of one, composing for the piano (without its aid) at four, and in general demonstrating amazing musical feats before most children could talk. Her formal study of piano started early, and she soon was performing in public concerts. But her musical studies were centered around her home—all her life her family insisted upon a more or less protected atmosphere. Even after they moved closer to Boston to further her studies, it was not in a conservatory. As Amy gained more and more of a public reputation, her parents stoutly resisted her move into a larger music circle. In a time when almost all talented Americans went abroad for advanced study, Amy stayed home. And it was always to be. She is one of the few significant composers that were largely autodidacts. She read, she studied scores, and translated important musical treatises and texts; she absorbed it all.
Her prowess as a performer led to a triumphal concert with the Boston Symphony in 1885, when she was eighteen. But she married a distinguished surgeon twenty-five years her senior right after that and her active career as a performer ended. True to the times and his social class her husband forbade her to perform actively anymore, and to stay home and lead a proper life as a woman of high social status. He did encourage her to compose, and she most certainly did. But she later said that these years were happy ones. While the great majority of her life’s work were art songs and chamber music, three large works from the 1890s were highly praised: the Mass (1892), the Gaelic Symphony (1896), and the Piano Concerto (1899). Unlike so many women composers, she never endured obscurity—the Mass was premièred by the prestigious Boston Handel and Haydn Society, and both the symphony and piano concerto by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. All of these works met with wide and enthusiastic approbation in spite of most pundits’ silly twaddling over her gender.
While the mass, symphony, concerto and chamber music were highly praised works of gravitas, like most accomplished composers, she had a lighter side, as well. The Bal masqué is clear evidence of that. Written in 1893, originally for solo piano—an early work in that genre--it is a charming waltz in the best of the salon tradition. Later, it was artfully scored for full orchestra by the composer.
--Wm. E. Runyan
©2022 William E. Runyan