Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer, 1867-1944

448 Pages·1998·29.13 MB·English

by  Adrienne Fried Block

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JTa<S3ior)a;u& Vic oolicisiy
THE
LIFE AND WORK
OF AN
AMERICAN COMPOSER
1867-1944
Adrienne Fried Block
New York Oxford ° Oxford University Press 1998
Oxford University Press
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Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1998 by Adrierme Fried Block
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Block, Adrienne Fried.
Amy Beach, passionate Victorian : the life and work of an
American composer, 1867-1944 / Adrienne Fried Block.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index,
ISBN 0-19-507408-4
i. Beach, H. H. A., Mrs., 1867-1944 2. Composers—United States—
Biography. 3. Women composers—United States—Biography.
I. Title.
ML4io.63665-6 1998
780'.92—dc2i 97-2710
[B]
The MacDowell Colony. Inc., heir to the unpublished materials of the Estate of Amy
Beach, has generously given permission to reproduce photographs, manuscripts,
and memborabilia from library collections.
The following publishers have given permission to use quotations from copyrighted
works. "Night Song at Amalfi," in the Collected Poems of SamTeasdale, copyright 1937 by
Macmillan Publishing Company; copyright renewed 1965 by Morgan Guarantee
Trust Company of New York, reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster.
"Rendez-vous," by Leonore Speyer, in A Conopic Jar, copyright 192 i by E. P. Dutton &
Co., reprinted by permission of A. A. Knopf and Bankers Trust Company, New York.
"Hillcrest," in The Collected Poems of E(hvin.AiIingion Robinson, copyright 1916 by Macmillan
Publishing Company, renewed 1944 by Ruth Nivision, reprinted by permission of
Simon and Schuster. The Poems ofWilliom Ernest Henley, copyright 1898 by Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons, renewed 1926, reprinted by permission of Scribner, a. division of Simon
and Schuster.
Publication of this book was supported in part by a grant from the H. Earle Johnson
fund of the Sonneck Society for American Music.
i 3 5 7 9 8 6 42
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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PREFACE
[H]ow inevitable it was that music should be
my life's work. Both in composition and piano
playing, there seemed to be such a strong at-
traction. . . . that no other life than that of a mu-
sician could ever have been possible for me.
(Amy Beach to Mrs. Edward F. Wiggers, 24 Au-
gust 1935).
IN 1917 AMY BEACH TURNED FIFTY. If in that year someone had proposed a full-
scale biography, people would have found it a perfectly reasonable thing to
do. The only objection might have been that it was too soon to be definitive,
that her life's course was only partially run. Over the preceding thirty years,
feature articles and interviews giving biographical information appeared in
newspapers and music journals with considerable frequency, whetting the
public's appetite for more. To women she was a heroine, not as glamorous as
a diva perhaps, but all the more remarkable for having ventured into a field of
composition thought to be the exclusive preserve of men—and having suc-
ceeded. To some, Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was thoroughly admirable; to
others, one who overstepped her boundary; but to both groups, an object of
interest if not curiosity.
The earliest evidence of public interest in Amy Marcy Cheney was an article
written when she was seven, reporting a private recital that included two un-
named works, one by Chopin and one by her. It marked her for the public as
a child prodigy. There is a mythic aura about a child who instinctively knows
how to play the piano and compose.
Amy Cheney was fortunate in that her family had moved from Henniker,
the small New Hampshire town where she was born, to Boston, an ideal place
for a gifted child to grow up. As she said, Boston was a "very musical" city; it
also took pride in and supported its own performers and composers. Together
with professional musicians, members of Boston's social and cultural elite
heard her play in drawing rooms and salons and adopted her years before her
debut. They found the girl irresistible and the teenager gifted and charming
and with enormous potential. Part of her attraction was that she was one of
their own, a Yankee like them, and a girl with extraordinary promise.
Her musical gifts undergirded her ambition, which was strong enough to
launch a performing career despite parental opposition. She became the first
American concert pianist to succeed with local training. Thus she helped de-
molish notions that only those trained in a German conservatory could make
ISUJ " PREFACE
a go of it. Her debut at sixteen, which took place in Boston's main concert
hall, had outstanding reviews; thereafter, she had a devoted concert audience
of Bostonians.
Her early success took place against a background of contention over
women's roles as musicians. Despite this, Beach's life in music was defined by
two quests: a global audience for herself as performer and composer and for
solutions to compositional problems. Those dual quests meant living a pub-
lic life and a life devoted to work. As Carolyn Heilbrun notes, it was a narra-
tive women were rarely empowered to pursue and even more rarely lived.
Beach eventually lived this narrative but only after surmounting some sizeable
obstacles.
Her parents' opposition to a concert career was the first. They allowed her a
debut but not the necessary next steps for building an international career. The
second was marriage, which put an end to her career as a local recitalist, but
had the effect of focusing her energies on composition. Now instead of Amy
Marcy Cheney, her professional name for most of the rest of her life was Mrs.
H. H. A. Beach, thus masking her former identity in the distinguished name of
her new husband, Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, M. D.
Both parents and husband opposed her studying composition with a
teacher, to her great disappointment. She turned that defeat into a triumph by
teaching herself whatever she needed to know about composition and orches-
tration. Wisely, she also continued to practice piano, giving one or two public
performances a year, occasionally playing a concerto with orchestra. She soon
added her own piano solos and chamber works to her concert repertory. Crit-
ics reviewed her programs as much for her new works as for her playing.
Thus, in a limited way, she circumvented the agreement with her husband to
abandon her concert career after marriage.
Her first recognition as a composer came when at age twenty-one, she played
Beethoven's third piano concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. For
the occasion she had written her own cadenza, a lengthy essay on Beethoven's
themes. Critics hailed it as substantial evidence of her promise as a composer.
When her Mass, op. :, was played, critics and public could finally take her
measure as a composer. The work, which takes over an hour, was given by 349
members of the leading American chorus, the Boston Handel and Haydn Soci-
ety, and accompanied by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was
so successful that her name became known well beyond Boston and imme-
diately generated two commissions. The first was for a concert aria given its
premiere by the New York Symphony, conducted by Walter Damrosch; the
other was for chorus and orchestra and conducted by Theodore Thomas at the
World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Her second even bigger success, the "Gaelic" Symphony, op. 32, premiered
by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896, moved an audience to intense
displays of approval and the critics to much praise—not unmixed with
caveats. A letter to Beach after the premiere from Boston composer George
Whitefield Chadwick made her acceptance official in the so-called Second New
England School of Composers. The symphony produced amazement in late
PREFACE ° ix~
nineteenth-century minds because a woman had written ior orchestra, taming
the unwieldy medium with mastery. All but one of the major American orches-
tras performed it during the next two decades. Her fame was then truly national.
Its spread was helped substantially by the timely publication of everything
she wrote between 1885" and 1914 by the firm of Arthur P. Schmidt, as part of
his commitment to support Boston's composers. This in turn encouraged many
more performances. Boston's musical establishment and Amy Beach herself
were responsible for the majority of performances of her -works during her
Boston years. As a composer, she needed such exposure to further the devel-
opment of her craft as well as to build the fine reputation she earned even be-
fore turning thirty.
Press criticism helped as well in establishing her as a composer. Even their
occasional attacks on aspects of her compositions served to show how seri-
ously they took her music. However, Beach learned early to let the audience be
her guide, valuing its response to her music more than that of any professional
reviewer. And respond people did—to her emotional depths, her lyricism
and, if sophisticated listeners, to her solid compositional designs. Performers
loved her work as well. Her reputation rippled, out from Boston as the divas of
opera's Golden Age adopted her songs. Her chamber music found illustrious
players and enthusiastic audiences not only in the United States but also in Eu-
rope, as later her orchestral pieces would.
Amy Beach was truly an American pioneer as a composer and the first suc-
cessful woman in the field. Being the token woman in the composition of
high art music had its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it helped
spread her fame; on the other, it suggested that as a woman composer she was
an aberration. Nevertheless, weighed in the balance against doubters and de-
tractors were her great gifts, her concentration on work, her location in Bos-
ton, and her timing: she was able to ride the crest of the first feminist move-
ment. The next generation of women composers found courage in Beach's
record as a pathfinder and model, formalizing her role with the honorific title
of dean of American women composers.
Personal tragedy struck in 1910 with the accidental death of her husband,
effectively ending her life in Boston. Grieving and alone but also newly in
charge of her life, Beach decided to return to her career as a performer -while
promoting her own works on the concert stage. She was free to go to Europe,
where she stayed for three years and found enthusiastic reception for her
major chamber and orchestral works and for her playing. She placed her career
on the line in Germany and won, despite the traditional hostility of local crit-
ics toward Americans and women. A manager made sure that her European
successes were regularly reported in the American press. Returning reluctantly
to the United States at the outset of World War I, she had a heroine's welcome
in Boston. Outstandingly successful years followed during which she criss-
crossed the country giving recitals. Beach told the press that she enjoyed noth-
ing more than traveling to a new place and conquering a new audience.
All that touring left little time for creative work. To compose she needed a
place out of the city and surrounded by nature. Beach tried out one locale after