Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (September 5, 1867 - December 27, 1944) was an American composer and pianist. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music. As a pianist, she was acclaimed for concerts she gave in the United States and in Germany.
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Biography
Early years, child prodigy
Amy Marcy Cheney was born in Henniker, New Hampshire. A child prodigy, she was able to sing forty songs accurately by age one; by age two she could improvise a counter-melody to any melody her mother sang; she taught herself to read at age three, and began composing simple waltzes at age five. Amy's mother, Clara Imogene Marcy Cheney, was herself an "excellent pianist and singer". She sang and played the piano for Amy. Despite this, her family struggled to keep up with her musical interest and demands. Young Amy often commanded what music was to be played and how. She was very particular and often became enraged if the music did not meet her demands. In addition, her mother forbade Amy from playing the family piano despite the child's wish to play, believing that indulging her would damage parental authority. At age four, she composed three piano pieces (waltzes) while spending the summer at her grandfather's farm in West Henniker, NH. There was no piano near the farm; Amy composed the pieces mentally and eventually played them at home.
Amy began formal piano lessons with her mother at age six. Fried Block (1998, p. 7) writes that in the social milieu of the time, "middle and upper class women gifted in music were turned away" from a career in it "because of the stigma attached to those who appeared as performers on the public stage." In Europe, Fanny Mendelssohn, sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, and herself a pianist and the composer of hundreds of compositions, encountered a similar stigma. But at age 7 Amy gave some public recitals, playing works by Handel, Beethoven, and Chopin, as well as her own pieces. One recital was reviewed in The Folio, an arts journal, and two or more agents proposed concert tours for the prodigy pianist, but Amy's parents declined, for which she was later grateful.
Amy's father, Charles Abbott Cheney, had forebears active in the anti-slavery and women's rights causes. Oren B. Cheney, an uncle of Charles, founded Bates College in Maine, the second-oldest coeducational college in the United States and oldest in the East, with first female graduate in 1869.
Clara had a sister Emma Francis "Franc" Marcy, who was also skilled in music. Before marrying she had left home to teach voice and piano in Boston. She married in 1867 Lyman Clement. Within a few years the couple moved to San Francisco, where Lyman had some success in banking. in 1874 the couple had a daughter Ethel, who "displayed a talent for art." In the 1890s Franc took Ethel "to study in New York, Boston, and twice to Paris."
Move to near Boston
In 1875, the Cheney family moved to Chelsea, a suburb just across the Mystic River from Boston, where they were advised to enter Amy into a European conservatory. Her parents opted for local training, hiring Ernst Perabo and later Carl Baermann as piano teachers. Baermann had been a student of Franz Liszt, the "most brilliant" European pianist, at the Munich Conservatory. At age fourteen, Amy received her only formal training in composition with Junius W. Hill, with whom she studied harmony and counterpoint for a year in 1881-82. Other than this one year of instruction, Amy was self-taught as a composer; she often learned by studying much earlier works, such as Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier. She got some useful advice later from the Boston Symphony Orchestra's conductor Wilhelm Gericke.
Early career
In Amy Cheney's concert debut 18 October 1883 in the Music Hall, Boston, when she was 16, she played Chopin's Rondo in E-flat and was piano soloist in Moscheles's piano concerto No. 3 in G minor, in a "Promenade Concert" conducted by Adolph Neuendorff. Her performance received large acclaim from critics. The audience also was "enthusiastic in the extreme." The next two years of her career included performances in Chickering Hall, as well as starring in the last performance of the Boston Symphony's 1884-85 season.
Marriage, composing career
Following her marriage in 1885 to Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a Boston surgeon 24 years older than she, her name, as on concert programs and published compositions, became "Mrs. H. H. A. Beach." She agreed to limit performances to two public recitals a year, with profits donated to charity. Following her husband's wishes, she devoted herself more to composition, although she wrote "I thought I was a pianist first and foremost". Henry did not approve of Amy studying composition with a teacher, so that in her further development as a composer, she was self-taught. "She collected every book she could find on theory, composition, and orchestration ... she taught herself ... counterpoint, harmony, fugue." Gevaert's and Berlioz's treatises [in French] on orchestration ... "were most composers' bibles". Amy translated them into English for herself.
Also, "along with her marriage vows, Amy" agreed with her husband "to live according to his status, that is, function as a society matron and patron of the arts. She agreed never to teach piano, an activity widely associated with women" and regarded as providing "pin money."
Further successful compositions
Her next major success was the Mass in E-flat major, which was performed in 1892 by the Handel and Haydn Society orchestra, founded in 1815. The well-received performance of the Mass moved Beach, according to newspaper music critics, into the rank of America's foremost composers. The Mass was the first piece composed by a woman that was performed by the Society. In 1883 the Society had performed a Mass by Luigi Cherubini, and in 1887 selections from Bach's B Minor Mass. Some parallels have been seen between passages in Beach's Mass and some in Cherubini's or, less clearly, in Bach's.
The group into which Amy Beach had graduated has been called the Second New England School of composers, an unofficial title, with members John Knowles Paine (1839-1926), Arthur Foote (1853-1937), George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931), Edward MacDowell (1860-1908), Horatio Parker (1863-1919), and soon also Beach. Beach's Gaelic Symphony, composed in 1896, was premiered October 30 by the Boston Symphony "with exceptional success". It was another important milestone in women's music, as it made her the first American woman to compose and publish a symphony. But, "whatever the merits or defects of the symphony were thought to be, critics went to extraordinary lengths in their attempts to relate them to the composer's sex." Around 1898 "critics stopped making Beach the target of sexual esthetics." After hearing the Gaelic Symphony, Chadwick wrote to Beach that he and Parker had attended the premiere and much enjoyed it: "I always feel a thrill of pride myself whenever I hear a fine work by any of us, and as such you will have to be counted in, whether you" wish to "or not--one of the boys." The five men previously in the Second New England School, together with Beach, became known as the Boston Six, of whom Beach was the youngest.
In 1900 she was soloist in the premiere of her Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony. Before writing the concerto Amy had been piano soloist in performances of piano concerti of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, and others. In a concerto performance, the soloist may compete against the conductor to set the tempo. In a rehearsal of the performance of a Mendelssohn concerto in 1885, the conductor decided, in light of Amy's youth, to take the last movement more slowly than usual. But when Amy began the piano part, it was at full prescribed tempo: "I did not know that he was sparing me, but I did know that the tempo dragged, and I swung the orchestra into time". It has been suggested that Beach expresses in her concerto her own struggles against her mother and her husband for control of her musical life.
Chamber music
Franz Kneisel was a leading violinist in Boston and beyond, having been hired at about age 20 by Wilhelm Gericke, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as concertmaster of the orchestra. Soon after arriving in Boston, he formed the Kneisel String Quartet with three other string players of the Boston Symphony. (The Quartet lasted until 1917. Meantime Kneisel moved to New York in 1905.) In 1894 Amy had joined the Quartet in performing Robert Schumann's Quintet for piano and strings.
In January 1897 Amy played, with Franz Kneisel, in the premiere of her Sonata for Piano and Violin, which she had composed in the spring of 1896. Critical reception In New York was mixed, but in Europe it was better: composer and pianist Teresa Carreño performed the piece with violinist Carl Halir in Berlin, October 1899 and wrote to Amy:
I assure you that I never had a greater pleasure in my life than the one I had in working out your beautiful sonata and having the good luck to bring it before the German public...(I)t really met with a decided success and this is said to the credit of the public.
In 1900, with the Kneisel Quartet, Amy performed the Brahms quintet for Piano and Strings. Beach wrote her own Quintet for piano and strings, in F-sharp minor, in 1905. "During Beach's lifetime, the work had well over forty performances, in dozens of cities, over the radio, and by many string quartets. A large number of those performances were with the composer at the piano, most notably during a lengthy tour in 1916 and 1917 with the Kneisel Quartet." This was the 33rd and last season for the Quartet. Amy performed her Quintet with them in Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Variations on Balkan Themes, Beach's "longest and most important solo" piano work, was composed in 1904. It responded to revolts in the Balkans against the then ruling Ottoman Empire.
Widowhood, years in Europe
Her husband died in June 1910 (the couple had been childless) and her mother 7 months later. Her father, Charles Cheney, had died in 1895. Beach felt unable to work for a while. She went to Europe in hopes of recovering there. In Europe she changed her name to "Amy Beach". She travelled together with Marcella (Marcia) Craft, an American soprano who was "prima donna of the Berlin Royal Opera." Beach's first year in Europe "was of almost entire rest." In 1912 she gradually resumed giving concerts, Her European debut was in Dresden, October 1912, playing her violin and piano sonata with violinist "Dr. Bülau," to favorable reviews. In Munich in January 1913, she gave a concert, again with her violin sonata, but now with three sets of songs, two of her own and one by Brahms, and solo piano music by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Two critics were rather unfavorable, one calling Beach's songs "kitschy." She was unfazed, saying the audience was "large and very enthusiastic." Demand arose for sheet music of Beach's songs and solo piano pieces, beyond the supply that Beach's publisher Arthur P. Schmidt had available for German music stores. Later In January, still in Munich, she performed in her Piano Quintet; a critic praised her composing, which he did not like all that well, more than her playing. In a further concert in Breslau, only three of Beach's songs were on the program, fewer than in Munich.
In November-December 1913 she played the solo part in her Piano Concerto with orchestras in Leipzig, Hamburg, and Berlin. Her Gaelic Symphony was also performed in Hamburg and Leipzig. A Hamburg critic wrote "we have before us undeniably a possessor of musical gifts of the highest kind; a musical nature touched with genius." She was greeted as the first American woman "able to compose music of a European quality of excellence."
Return to America and later life
She returned to America in 1914, not long after the beginning of World War I. Beach and Craft made pro-German statements to the American press, but Beach said her allegiance was to "the musical, not the militaristic Germany." She gave some manuscripts of music she had written in Europe to Craft, who brought them back to the U.S. Beach delayed her own departure until September 1914 and so had a further trunkful of manuscripts confiscated at the Belgian border. Beach eventually recovered the trunk and contents in 1929.
In 1915, the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco commemorated the opening of the Panama Canal and the city's recovery from the 1906 earthquake and fire. Amy Beach was honored often by concerts of her music and receptions during 1915, and her Panama Hymn was commissioned for the occasion. In 1915 and again in 1916 Amy in San Francisco visited her aunt Franc and cousin Ethel, who by then were her closest living relatives. About 6 August 1916, Amy, Franc, and Ethel left San Francisco together, leaving Franc's husband Lyman behind, a "fifty-year-old marriage broken apart", for unknown reasons. The three women took up residence in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, where Franc and Amy's mother had been born. Lyman "was settled" in a Veterans' Home in California from 1917 until his death in 1922. After 1916, "Hillsborough was Beach's official residence: there she voted in presidential elections." In 1918, Amy's cousin Ethel "developed a terminal illness," and Amy spent time taking care of her, as Franc, at age 75, "could hardly" do so by herself.
Aside from concert tours and the time of Ethel's illness until her death in 1920, Beach also spent part of her time in New York. Someone had asked her if she were the daughter of Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. She resumed using that married name, but used "Amy Beach" on bookplates and stationery. For a few summers she composed at her cottage in Centerville, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.
While continuing to get income from her compositions published by Arthur P. Schmidt, during 1914-1921 she had new compositions published by G. Schirmer. The Centerville cottage had been built on a five-acre property Amy had bought with royalties from one song, Ecstasy, 1892, her most successful up until then.
From 1921 on she spent part of each summer as a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where she composed several works. She encountered there some other women composers and/or musicians, including Emilie Frances Bauer, Marion Bauer, Mabel Wheeler Daniels, Fannie Charles Dillon, and Ethel Glenn Hier, who "were or became long-time friends" of Beach. But there were "generational and gender divisions" among the Fellows in music, with some feeling that Beach's music was "no longer fashionable".
In 1924 Beach sold the house in Boston she had inherited from her husband. Her aunt Franc had become "feeble" around 1920, developed dementia in 1924, and died in November 1925 in Hillsborough, after which Beach had no surviving relatives as close as Ethel and Franc had been. In the fall of 1930 Beach rented a studio apartment in New York. There she became the virtual composer-in-residence at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church. Her music had been used during the previous 20 years in services at the church, attributed to "H. H. A. Beach", with "Mrs." added only from 1931 on.
She used her status as the top female American composer to further the careers of young musicians. While she had agreed not to give private music lessons while married, Beach was able to work as a music educator during the early 20th century. She worked to coach and give feedback to various young composers, musicians, and students. Given her status and advocacy for music education, she was in high demand as a speaker and performer for various educational institutions and clubs, such as the University of New Hampshire, where she received an honorary master's degree in 1928. She also worked to create "Beach Clubs," which helped teach and educate children in music. She served as leader of some organizations focused on music education and women, including the Society of American Women Composers as its first president.
Beach spent the winter and spring of 1928-29 in Rome. She went to concerts "almost daily" and found Respighi's Feste Romane, just written in 1928, to be "superbly brilliant," but disliked a piece by Paul Hindemith. In March 1929 she gave a concert to benefit the American Hospital in Rome, in which her song "The Year's at the Spring" was encored and a "large sum of money" was raised. Beach, like her friends in Rome, became an admirer of the Italian dictator Mussolini. She returned to the United States with a two-week stopover in Leipzig, where she met her old friend, the singer Marcella Craft.
Heart disease led to Beach's retirement in 1940 and her death in New York City in 1944.
Piano Lessons Newport Beach Video
Compositions
A member of the "Second New England School" or "Boston Group," she is the lone female considered alongside composers John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, George Whiting, and Horatio Parker. Her writing is mainly in a Romantic idiom, often compared to that of Brahms or Rachmaninoff. In her later works she experimented, moving away from tonality, employing whole tone scales and more exotic harmonies and techniques.
Beach's compositions include a one-act opera, Cabildo, and a variety of other works.
Symphonic works
She wrote the Gaelic Symphony (1896) and the Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor. Another orchestral piece, Bal masque, has a solo piano version. Two further pieces, Eilende Wolken and Jephthah's Daughter, are for orchestra with voice.
Choral works
Sacred choral works among Beach's compositions are mainly for 4 voices and organ, but a few are for voices and orchestra, two being the Mass in E-flat major (1892) and Beach's setting to music of St. Francis's Canticle of the Sun (1924,1928), first performed at St. Bartholomew's in New York. A setting of the Te Deum (with organ) was first performed by the choir of men and boys at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Boston. Betty Buchanan, Musical Director of the Capitol Hill Choral Society in Washington, D.C., had founded it in 1983. The Society under her direction in 1998 recorded the Canticle of the Sun, seven Communion Responses, and various other pieces by Beach.
There are some tens of secular choral works, accompanied by orchestra, piano, or organ.
Publisher Arthur P. Schmidt once complained to Beach that her "choral pieces had practically no sale," seemingly suggesting preference for solo piano works or songs.
Chamber music
Her chamber music compositions include a violin and piano sonata (recorded on seven different labels), a Romance and three further pieces for violin and piano, a piano trio, and a piano quintet.
Solo piano music
One of the many pieces is Variations on Balkan Themes. Large numbers of solo piano pieces have been recorded by pianists Kirsten Johnson (4-disc set), Joanne Polk (3-disc set), and Virginia Eskin (see the Discography).
Songs
She was most popular, however, for her songs, of which she wrote about 150. The words of about five each are her own and those of H. H. A. Beach, for the rest by other poets. "The Year's At the Spring" from Three Browning Songs, Op. 44 is perhaps Beach's best-known work. Despite the volume and popularity of the songs during her lifetime, no single-composer collection of Beach's songs exists. Some may be purchased through Hildegard Publishing Company and Masters Music Publication, Inc.
In the early 1890s, Beach started to become interested in folk songs. She shared that interest with several of her colleagues, and this interest soon came to be the first nationalist movement in American music. Beach's contributions included about thirty songs inspired by folk music, including Scottish, Irish, Balkan, African-American, and Native American origins.
Writings
Beach was a musical intellectual who wrote for journals, newspapers, and other publications. She gave advice to young musicians and composers--especially female composers. From career to piano technique advice, Beach readily provided her opinions in articles such as, "To the Girl who Wants to Compose", and "Emotion Versus Intellect in Music." In 1915, she had written Music's Ten Commandments as Given for Young Composers, which expressed many of her self-teaching principles.
Late 20th century and early 21st century revival and reception
Despite her fame and recognition during her lifetime, Beach was largely neglected after her death in 1944 until the late 20th century, possibly because she had been an admirer of the Italian dictator Mussolini. Efforts to revive interest in Beach's works have been largely successful during the last few decades.
Gaelic Symphony
The symphony has received praise from modern critics, such as Andrew Achenbach of Gramophone, who in 2003 lauded the work for its "big heart, irresistible charm and confident progress." In 2016, Jonathan Blumhofer of The Arts Fuse wrote:
"To my ears, it is by far the finest symphony by an American composer before Ives and, by a wide margin, better than a lot that came after him. It surely is the most exciting symphony penned by an American before World War I. [...] Her command of instrumentation throughout the Symphony was consistently excellent and colorful. The manner in which she balanced content and form succeeds where her contemporaries like George Whitefield Chadwick, John Knowles Paine, and Horatio Parker so often came up short: somehow Beach's Symphony is never daunted by the long shadows Brahms and Beethoven cast across the Atlantic. It's a fresh, invigorating, and personal statement in a genre that has offered plenty of examples of pieces that demonstrate none of those qualities."
Piano Concerto
Beach's Piano Concerto has been praised as an overlooked masterwork by modern critics. In 1994 Phil Greenfield of The Baltimore Sun called it "a colorful, dashing work that might become extremely popular if enough people get a chance to hear it. In 2000 Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle also lauded the composition, writing:
Its four movements are packed with incident -- beautifully shaped melodies (several of them drawn from her songs), a forthright rhythmic profile and a vivacious and sometimes contentious interplay between soloist and orchestra. The piano part is as flashy and demanding as a virtuoso vehicle calls for, but there is also an element of poignancy about it -- a sense of constraint that seems to shadow even the work's most extroverted passages.
Andrew Achenbach of Gramophone similarly declared it "ambitious" and "singularly impressive... a rewarding achievement all round, full of brilliantly idiomatic solo writing ... lent further autobiographical intrigue by its assimilation of thematic material from three early songs".
Tributes and memorials
In 1994, the Boston Women's Heritage Trail placed a bronze plaque at her Boston address, and in 1995, Beach's gravesite at Forest Hills Cemetery was dedicated. In 1999, she was put into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 2000, the Boston Pops paid tribute by adding her name as the first woman joining 86 other composers on the granite wall of Boston's famous Hatch Shell.
Discography (incomplete)
Solo piano music
- Piano Music, Vol. 1, The Early Works, Kirsten Johnson, piano, Guild GMCD 7317
- Piano Music, Vol. 2, The Turn of the Century, Kirsten Johnson, piano, Guild GMCD 7329
- Piano Music, Vol. 3, The Mature Years, Kirsten Johnson, piano, Guild GMCD 7351
- Piano Music, Vol. 4, The Late Works, Kirsten Johnson, piano, Guild GMCD 7387
- By the Still Waters, Joanne Polk, piano, Allmusic Z6693
- Under the Stars, Joanne Polk, piano, Arabesque, B000005ZYW
- Fire Flies, Joanne Polk, piano. "Manufactured on demand"
Other chamber music
Amy Beach, Sonata for violin and piano in A minor, Op. 34:
- Mrs. H.H.A. (Amy) Beach (1867-1944), music for two pianos. Virginia Eskin and Kathleen Supové, pianists. Koch 3-7345-2
- Amy Beach, Songs. Sung by mezzo-soprano Katherine Kelton and accompanied by pianist Catherine Bringerud. Naxos 8559191
Orchestral Music, possibly with chorus
- Amy Beach, Canticle of the Sun, Op. 123; Invocation for the Violin, Op. 55; With Prayer and Supplicaton, Op. 8; Te Deum, from Service in A, Op. 63; Constant Christmas, Op. 95; On a Hill; Kyrie eleison, Op. 122; Sanctus, Op. 122; Agnus Dei, Op. 122; Spirit of Mercy, Op. 125; Evening Hymn, Op. 125; I Will Give Thanks, Op. 147; Peace I leave With You, Op. 8. Performed by Capitol Hill Choral Society, Betty Buchanan, Music Director, Albany Records, 1998, TROY295
- Amy Beach, Grand Mass in E-flat major. Performed by the Stow Festival Chorus and Orchestra. Albany Records, 1995. TROY179
- Amy Beach, Grand Mass in E-flat major, Performed by the Michael May Festival Chorus. Compact disc. Newport Classic, 1989, 60008
- Amy Beach, Piano Concerto in C sharp minor with pianist Alan Feinberg and the Symphony in E minor ("Gaelic"). Performed by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Schermerhorn. Naxos 8559139. Note: one review of this mentions "Symphony No. 2" but Beach only wrote one symphony, the Gaelic.
Sources
- Fried Block, Adrienne (1998), Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian, Oxford University Press, New York, ISBN 0195074084
- Fried Block, Adrienne (2001). "Beach [née Cheney], Amy Marcy [Mrs H.H.A. Beach]". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
- Gates, Eugene (2010). "Mrs. H.H.A. Beach: American Symphonist" (PDF). The Kapralova Society Journal. 8 (2): 1-10.
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