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Amy Beach
Born 5 September 1867, Henniker, New Hampshire. Amy Beach was the first major woman composer from the United States. A musician of tremendous abilities, she negotiated the demands of career, marriage, and fame with enviable aplomb—the sort of grace that often characterized women of the American upper class in those days. Like most well-bred girls of the era, Amy Marcy Cheney was introduced to the piano by her mother. When the family moved to Boston she had the opportunity of studying with excellent local teachers of piano and harmony, and in 1883 made her local debut as soloist in a piano concerto. In 1885, at the age of 18, she married the Boston physician Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, twenty-five years her senior. Thereafter she styled herself, in tribute to that happy arrangement, Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. In the 25 years of her marriage until her husband's death in 1910, Beach tried to limit her public appearances to an annual piano recital and the premieres of her own works. Meanwhile she profited from her leisure to absorb the vast repertoire of the European late-Romantic period, putting what she had taught herself to work in compositions of ever increasing ambition and sophistication. This was the period of her best large-scale work: the Gaelic Symphony (1894), Violin Sonata (1896), and Piano Concerto (1899). The Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the first performances of the symphony and, with Beach as piano soloist, the concerto. Quite apart from the intrinsic merit of the works, which is substantial, both premieres were historic for the annals of women in music. Works
Orchestra
Chorus and Orchestra, Cantatas
Chamber Music Songs
Solo Piano Works |