AmyBeach

Amy Marcy Cheney was born on 5 September 1867 in Henniker, New Hampshire, the only child of a paper manufacturer and a singer-pianist. At four she spent a summer on her grandfather’s farm in West Henniker, where there was no piano, and composed three waltzes in her head; she played them when she got home. Her mother would not teach her the piano until she was six. “I was not allowed to climb up on her lap, or on the music stool,” Beach remembered. “I could only hear music, think music.”

1871–⁠85Boston debut and marriage

The Cheneys moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1871 and to Boston in 1875. Ernst Perabo and then Carl Baermann, a pupil of Liszt, taught her the piano; Junius Hill gave her a year of harmony. Boston musicians told her parents to send her to Europe. They kept her at home. On 24 October 1883, aged sixteen, she played Moscheles’s G minor Concerto and Chopin’s E♭ Rondo at the Boston Music Hall. Her first song in print, The Rainy Day, a Longfellow setting, appeared the same year. On 28 March 1885 she played Chopin’s F minor Concerto with the Boston Symphony under Wilhelm Gericke.

1892–⁠96Mass in E♭ and “Gaelic” Symphony

On 7 February 1892 the Handel and Haydn Society gave her Mass in E♭ at the Boston Music Hall under Carl Zerrahn, the first mass composed by an American woman. In December the New York Symphony Society under Walter Damrosch played Eilende Wolken, her concert aria on Schiller’s Mary Stuart, with the contralto Katie Alves. Festival Jubilate opened the Woman’s Building at the Chicago exposition on 1 May 1893, with Theodore Thomas conducting.

Dvořák had told the New York Herald in May 1893 that “In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” That December Beach heard the “New World” Symphony in Boston and wrote in her journal that Dvořák might have given more of “the dark, tragic, side!” She told the Boston Herald that Northerners “should be far more likely to be influenced by the old English, Scotch, or Irish songs inherited with our literature from our ancestors.” She wrote the “Gaelic” Symphony in 1894–⁠96.

1897–⁠1910Sonata, concerto, quintet

The Violin Sonata in A minor was new to the Kneisel Quartet’s fourth concert at Association Hall on 4 January 1897, with Mrs Beach at the piano. On 6 April 1900, in the old Music Hall, she played her own Piano Concerto in C♯ minor with the Boston Symphony under Gericke, the conductor whose advice had sent her to study the orchestra’s concerts. Hale was less favourable this time and called it “a disappointment in nearly every way”. On 27 February 1908 she and the Hoffmann Quartet gave the first performance of her Piano Quintet in F♯ minor at Potter Hall, Boston.

1910–⁠14Europe

Dr Beach died on 28 June 1910, after a fall; her mother died on 18 February 1911. On 5 September 1911 Beach sailed for Europe. She was a bad sailor, and she told an interviewer she had half hoped to cross “by some other way—perhaps by a flying machine”. From the autumn of 1912 she played her concerto, sonata and quintet in German cities, and the “Gaelic” Symphony was performed in Leipzig and Hamburg. A photograph from Munich, dated 14 February 1913, shows her with the soprano Marcella Craft, who had sung her songs in European recitals for years. After the Hamburg concert in December 1913, Dr Ferdinand Pfohl wrote in the Hamburger Nachrichten that “one need only mention the names of Amelie Nikisch and Amy Beach in order to refute this foolish prejudice concerning women composers.” She was home in the autumn of 1914.

1921–⁠44The MacDowell Colony and later years

In the summer of 1921 she began the first of eighteen residencies at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, working in the Watson studio. A hermit thrush sang near her. She wrote down its songs and based two piano pieces on them, A Hermit Thrush at Eve and A Hermit Thrush at Morn, Op. 92. A footnote to the second reads: “These bird-calls are exact notations of hermit thrush songs, in the original keys, but an octave lower, obtained at MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, N.H.” Younger composers there called her Aunt Amy.

She became the first president of the Society of American Women Composers, made New York her winter home from 1930, and wrote her only opera, Cabildo, in 1932; it reached the stage at Athens, Georgia, on 27 February 1945. Beach died of heart failure in her New York apartment on 27 December 1944. She left her copyright to the MacDowell Colony, and her royalties still support it. “My work has always been judged from the beginning by work as such, not according to sex,” she said near the end.