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 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 those musical 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 total 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 woman 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. The Gaelic Symphony is an especial landmark, given that it is the first major symphony composed and published by an American woman. Not only that, it is a fine composition that is somewhat in the style of the symphonies of Brahms and Dvořák—in my opinion, especially the latter. In it she demonstrated eloquently what she had learned on her own: masterful orchestration, melodic gift, dramatic savvy, skill in development, and coordination of large-scale form. The work takes its name from her deep interest and sympathy for the lot of Irish folk, both in Ireland, and in Boston, especially. Nowadays it is often forgotten the depth of contempt that most Americans had for the Irish in the nineteenth-century, and the prejudices held against them. Unlike Dvořák, she did not prescribe African-American musical elements as a general resource for classical composers seeking to establish an authentic “American” style. Leave that to African-Americans she opined and use the traditions from your own ethnic background that you understand—and so she did. Like the first four symphonies of Gustav Mahler, her Gaelic Symphony makes extensive reference to song. For Beach, Irish melodies, as well as some of her own, serve for source material. It’s a large, dynamic work, often heavily orchestrated, and occasionally a bit prolix, but withal, a fine one.
The first movement makes extensive use of an art song that she had written a few years earlier, Dark is the Night, a tempestuous sea song. The low, rumbling opening aptly evokes stormy seas, leading to the main themes. Both derive from the song, but at her expert hands they don’t simply serve as quotable melodies, but undergo a sophisticated expansion and manipulation. The third theme is perhaps more lyric, and sounds like a kind of Irish dance, with a bagpipe-like drone in the accompaniment. An extensive, dramatic development ensues that, after an impressive build up, leads to the recapitulation, marked clearly by a pensive clarinet solo in the low register. A rousing coda follows. Throughout, Beach indulges in the chromaticism and rich variety of key areas typical of late German Romanticism—and the mood of her sea, like that of Debussy’s La Mer, rapidly swings between light and darkness.
A dance-like scherzo movement has long been more or less conventional for a symphony, but in this case, Beach—like Brahms–cleverly introduces a creative twist to the old recipe of a tripartite relaxed middle section bookended by more energetic ones. Rather, she opens and ends with a gentle siciliano dance with a bustling middle section. The chief melodic material is based upon the song, “The Little Field of Barley.” Her precocious mastery of orchestral color surfaces in the graceful solos for winds in both siciliano sections. The middle section is a scintillating dash of a scherzo—it would have done justice to Berlioz in its élan. A wisp of a reference to it serves as a codetta at the end of the last siciliano.
Two traditional Irish tunes—“Cushlamachree” and “Which Way Did She Go?”–
provide material for the dark-colored third movement. Beach commented specifically that the mood stems from the “laments” of the Irish and their long travails. After a brief introduction featuring the woodwinds, an impassioned violin solo, marked quasi recitativo soon is joined in duet by the solo violoncello, only to then pass it over to the woodwind section. The movement proceeds with a succession of lyrical solos by almost everyone in great combinative variety, and demonstrates eloquently Beach’s mastery of counterpoint and late romantic harmony. Perhaps a more experienced symphonic composer would have essayed more unity, employing less with more here, but the movement nevertheless is a fine one.
Beach employs the traditional sonata form for the last movement, and it is a dynamic one, indeed. She wrote of the “rough, primitive nature of the Celtic people” and it is writ large here to be sure. No traditional folk songs inform the movement, but her acknowledged melodic gifts suggest them. After a tutti outburst, soft bustling strings set the mood. The energetic first theme has a sharply profiled rhythm that is soon omnipresent—first heard in the woodwinds, but soon taken by all. In admirable economy of means, the movement deftly plunges ahead. It doesn’t take long to reach the lyrical second theme, heard in the low strings and bassoons. The development is introduced by a stentorian interruption in the low brass that would do justice to Bruckner. The themes are dutifully worked through, in a refreshing bout of keys, and the recap is soon upon us. In the best fashion it builds in cascades of excitement, all the time working with the two familiar themes, supported by strong pronouncements in the brass in the best romantic fashion. Finally, the beatific key of E major signals our final triumph.
Beach’s Gaelic Symphony was a remarkable first effort by a thirty-year old, self-taught composer. One distinguished commentator called it the best American symphony to that time, and better than much in the public eye that followed. But, unfortunately for the musical life of our country, it was Beach’s only essay in the genre. After her husband’s death in 1910 she led an active life in music, both in this country and abroad, composing and concertizing all the while, leaving an impressive oeuvre. In addition, she wrote and spoke, and was a leader in American music. She died in 1944. Unfortunately, for several decades her works and musical style were often seen as old-fashioned, too romantic, and out of date. A more progressive, modernistic, avant garde generation of American composers dominated the musical scene—names well known to all. Now, of course, that has changed. The appreciation of Amy Beach that waned after WW I is now genuinely and justifiably revived. She is an American treasure.
–Wm. E. Runyan
©2021 William E. Runyan