STANFORD & BEACH
Notes on the composers and the pieces
Sir Charles Villiers Stanford
Phaudhrig Crohoore
Amy Beach
Symphony in E Minor (“Gaelic”)
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Amy Beach: Symphony in E Minor (“Gaelic”) (1896)
Composer and piano virtuoso Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867-1944) was the first major female American composer of classical music. Born in Henniker, New Hampshire, she was a musical prodigy with absolute pitch and a powerful memory. Her early progress was remarkable. Between ages one and four she was singing tunes, improvising counterpoint to her musician mother’s singing, learning to read, and composing. Her mother gave Amy piano lessons at age six, but reluctantly because she saw no future for female musicians. At seven, Amy gave a recital that included her own works. At eight her parents took her to local teachers: Ernst Perabo and later Carl Baermann, a student of Liszt. Her only other lessons were harmony and counterpoint with Junius Hill at fourteen. Amy made her debut as a piano soloist with orchestra when she was sixteen, and two years later performed Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony (BSO), both to good reviews.
That same year she brought a hand problem to Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a respected Boston surgeon and member of the rarified Boston Brahmin social scene. Henry was twenty-five years her senior, but he was a serious musician as a young man and appreciated her talent. Their fast rapport and marriage set a new course for Amy Beach. The couple lived in Boston’s posh Back Bay where she learned to run a household fit for her new social status. Far more serious was the change in her musical routine, as dictated by her new husband (with her parents’ support). Because it was unseemly to grovel for money by teaching or performing, she would give up her students and limit performances to one a year, with remunerations going to charity. She would also shift her concentration from performing to composition, honing those skills through self study only (possibly to limit her outside musical contacts, but also because
Henry feared a teacher would stunt her creativity). Professionally, she would be known as Mrs. H.H.A. Beach.
Although at times Amy managed to perform quite a bit, most of her married life was spent running her household (helped by her mother, who in 1895 moved in after the death of Amy’s father), and composing in an office Henry had built for her. A tireless and assiduous worker, she spent hours studying and memorizing scores before taking them to concerts to hear the written notes come to life. She even learned French to translate composition treatises by François-Auguste Gevaert and Hector Berlioz.
Henry Beach was controlling, but his recognition of his wife’s talent and his support of her career is indisputable. He also taught her about handling money, etc. Unlike many composers, Amy worked in comfortable surroundings free of financial worries, though her biographer, Adrienne Fried Block, convincingly pointed out that Beach might have been a finer composer had a teacher been able to fix a few flaws in her technique.
Mrs. H.H.A Beach’s first important performance was of the Mass in E Flat (1890) by the Handel and Haydn Society. There was Festival Jubilate (1891) for the World’s Columbian Exposition, plus the Violin Sonata (1896), Piano Concerto (1899, premiered by the BSO with Beach as soloist), Piano Quintet (1907), and others. A defining moment occurred in 1892, when Antonin Dvorak joined the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, partly to create a domestic tradition for American classical music. In 1893, two unsigned articles in the New York Herald claiming that Dvorak believed American composers should focus on African-American folk music for their inspiration, set off reactions in the U.S. and Europe. One was from Amy Beach. After acknowledging the cruel history of African-Americans, she wrote, “We of the North should be far more likely to be influenced by the old English, Scotch, or Irish songs, inherited with our literature from our ancestors.”
She put her theory into action by researching Irish folk music and songs. One result was Gaelic Symphony based on “laments...romance, and…dreams” of the Irish people. The work employs four complete Irish tunes of “simple rugged and unpretentious beauty,” three quoted in their entirety, plus one of Beach’s songs. The main musical influence is Brahms, some of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and probably Charles Stanford’s Irish Symphony, which the BSO performed in 1890 and was very popular in the U.S. It was a risky venture for a young female composer at that time. Because symphonic form is difficult to work with, composing a symphony was considered a man’s job, and Beach’s mistaken belief that Gaelic would be the first symphony by a woman added to the pressure. (Several European women had already composed symphonies.) Nevertheless, she began it with strong encouragement from her husband.
The work’s first movement, Allegro con fuoco, is in sonata form, with both themes based on Beach’s “Dark Is the Night!” about a tempestuous sea voyage. The first is stormy, the second lyrical, and there is a “bagpipe” Irish jig based on “Connor O’Reilly of Clounish.” Alla Siciliana-Allegro vivace is based on an Irish lullaby “Little Field of Barley,” stated slowly in the oboe, then treated as a Mendelssohnian scherzo, then slowly by the English horn. ?Lento con molto espressione employs mainly another Irish lullaby, “The Lively Child” (in the cello), then the grief-stricken “Which Way Did She Go?” (strings), followed by the two worked together. Allegro di molto is in sonata form. The first theme is taken from the first movement; the second is a sweeping idea that undergoes the full Romantic treatment before a brassy conclusion.
Gaelic’s 1896 premiere by the BSO led by its dedicatee, Emil Paur, established Beach as a major figure. George Whitefield Chadwick, a major American composer and head of the New England Conservatory, attended the concert and in a letter treasured by Beach wrote: “you will have to be counted in, whether you [like it] or not—one of the boys,” thereby including her in the Boston Six or the Second New England School, a group of six conservative American composers: Chadwick, Beach, Horatio Parker, John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, and Edward MacDowell.
All was well until Amy lost her husband in 1910 and her mother seven months later. She grieved for a year, but freed of their constraints, eventually fled to Europe and threw herself into performing and promoted her music, particularly her symphony and piano concerto, with herself as soloist—all to enthusiastic reviews. After the Great War forced her return to the United States, she continued performing and composing. A cheerful, friendly person, she also pursued teaching, writing, and promoting education. After some moving around, she settled in Hillsborough, New Hampshire and became a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough. She died of heart disease in 1944.
Amy Beach’s over three hundred works include songs, choral and piano pieces, one short opera, and some wonderful chamber music. Her style is typical of the American classical music of her time: Romantic, tuneful, Germanic-centered, and influenced by Brahms. Late in her career, she worked with advanced techniques like chromaticism and whole tone scales, but once she was gone, her music was dismissed as old fashioned until a recent renaissance. Amy Beach’s Boston presence is marked by a bronze plaque at her Boston address (28 Commonwealth Avenue); the dedication of the Beachs’ graves at Forest Hills Cemetery, and the granite wall of the Hatch Memorial Shell.
—Roger Hecht
Roger Hecht plays trombone in the Mercury Orchestra and Bay Colony Brass (where he is the Operations/Personnel Manager). He is a former member of the Syracuse Symphony, Lake George Opera, New Bedford Symphony, and Cape Ann Symphony, as well as trombonist and orchestra manager of Lowell House Opera, Commonwealth Opera, and MetroWest Opera. He is a regular reviewer forAmerican Record Guide, contributed to Classical Music: Listener’s Companion, and has written articles on music for the Elgar Society Journal and Positive Feedback Magazine. His fiction collection, The Audition and Other Stories, includes a novella about a trombonist preparing for and taking a major orchestra audition (English Hill Press, 2013).
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