Amy Beach

Amy Marcy Cheney was born on 5 September 1867 in Henniker, a small town in New Hampshire in the United States. Her mother, Clara, was an excellent pianist and singer. The child’s gifts were extraordinary: at one she could sing some forty tunes accurately; at two she improvised a second voice above her mother’s songs; at four she composed little waltzes in her head and then played them on the piano. She had perfect pitch and even associated keys with colours.

Her mother, fearing she would become a child prodigy paraded in public, at first restricted her access to the piano, then gave her lessons herself. In 1875 the family moved to Boston, a major musical centre. Amy studied piano with Ernst Perabo and Carl Baermann, a pupil of Liszt, but she took almost no composition lessons: she taught herself harmony, counterpoint and orchestration, translating French treatises and studying the scores of the great masters.

In 1883, aged sixteen, she made her debut as a pianist in Boston with a Moscheles concerto, and success was immediate. In 1885 she played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. That same year, at eighteen, she married Dr Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a renowned Boston surgeon twenty-four years her senior. Following the conventions of the time, she now signed herself “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach” and agreed to limit her concerts to one or two a year, with the proceeds going to charity. She then devoted herself to composition.

In 1892 her Mass in E flat, premiered by Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, was the first such work by an American woman to be performed by that prestigious institution. In 1893 she was commissioned to write the Festival Jubilate for the opening of the Woman’s Building at the Chicago World’s Fair. In 1896 her “Gaelic” Symphony, inspired by Irish folk melodies, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra: the first symphony by an American woman to be performed and published.

The composer George Whitefield Chadwick then hailed her as “one of the boys”, welcoming her into the Boston group of composers, the “Second New England School”. In 1900 she premiered her own Piano Concerto in C sharp minor with the Boston orchestra. She also composed more than 150 songs, including the very popular The Year’s at the Spring, chamber music such as the Piano Quintet (1907) and many piano pieces.

In 1910 her husband died, followed by her mother a few months later. Freed from convention, Amy Beach left for Europe in 1911, where for three years she gave triumphant concerts in Germany, playing her own works. German critics hailed her as one of the great composers of her time. Back in the United States in 1914, she resumed her career as pianist and composer. From 1921 she spent her summers at the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ residence in New Hampshire, where she composed in peace.

A nature lover, she notated birdsong and incorporated it into pieces such as Hermit Thrush at Eve and Hermit Thrush at Morn (1922). She actively supported young women musicians and in 1925 became founding president of the Society of American Women Composers. She also composed a chamber opera, Cabildo (1932), and sacred works. Suffering from heart disease, she died in New York on 27 December 1944. She is regarded as the first great American woman composer of art music.