The final chapter of the analytical portion of this collection addresses three works that defy easy generic categorization. While the classification of “dramatic work” can be defined in multiple ways, for Amy Beach it encompasses a select few compositions over the course of her career: two dramatic unstaged arias for solo voice and orchestra, Eilende Wolken, Segler der Lüfte (1892), and Jephthah’s Daughter (1903), and her only opera, Cabildo (1932).
It was not unusual for Romantic-era composers to create stand-alone vocal compositions in the style of nineteenth-century operatic scena ed aria. The drama of the scena’s declamatory recitative and the contrasting tempos and styles of the multipart aria provide an appealing closed format for a composer such as Beach, with her talent for vocal composition. Beach’s dramatic works are distinct from her cantatas and other church, choral, or solo voice works. The arias were originally for solo voice accompanied by orchestra and were published in a piano–vocal format shortly after their completion. Cabildo is a one-act chamber opera accompanied by piano trio. Premiered after Beach’s death, Cabildo was not published, but it is still occasionally performed despite its manuscript format.
What Connects Beach’s Dramatic Works?
Amy Beach’s appreciation for opera is evident from the journals she kept throughout her life, enjoying performances of opera during her tours of Europe and while she lived in New York. Beach appreciated even quite modern dramatic works: she was very enthusiastic about the performance of her friend Marcella Craft (1874–1959) originating the title role in Richard Strauss’s Salome,1 and she found a performance of Porgy and Bess to be “thrilling, full of color and a haunting atmospheric spirit.”2 While she appreciated modern styles as an audience member, as a composer she was slower to absorb stylistic changes and explore new genres.
All three of Beach’s dramatic works also share topics of history or biblical drama: relatively safe ground for a Bostonian composer who may have felt a subconscious reluctance to engage with works for the stage; a lingering skepticism from Boston’s puritanical cultural roots that saw theater of any kind banned from the Revolutionary War through the end of the 1700s.3 Beach’s first major composition, her Grand Mass in E-flat major, was premiered by the Handel and Haydn Society, and her years of churchgoing and composing for St. Bartholomew’s in New York also demonstrate that when she wrote dramatic works for voice they were often religious. But biblical figures and historical stories were safe territory for dramatic vocal works even by Beach’s own estimation. Her music was harmonically adventurous and highly chromatic by the end of her career, but unlike some of the other operas composed by her contemporaries, Beach’s subject matter did not venture into the experimental, political, or present-day.
The three dramatic works are united by the prominent central figure of a tragic female character. While a tragic female role is not an uncommon theme, the voices of the women in Beach’s works are – if not empowered – powerfully dignified and claiming agency as they can. The popular historical figure Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, is the voice of Eilende Wolken, nostalgic but unrepentantly sure of her identity despite her isolated imprisonment. The unnamed Jephthah’s daughter reflects with a resigned dignity on what she stands to lose as a young woman fated to die before her time, a victim of circumstances beyond her control. Finally, while Lady Valerie dies before the events of Cabildo begin, she is the catalyst of the opera’s plot: the mystery of her love for Pierre piques the newlywed Mary’s interest, Valerie’s commitment to Pierre’s goodness saves him from himself (and political and historical ignominy), and in Mary’s dream – or perhaps her vision of the past – Valerie is the one who frees Pierre, allowing him to save New Orleans and the United States.
Each of these dramatic works also reflects Beach’s lifelong habit of collaborating with other female artists. Her partnerships with the singers C. Katie Alves and Marcella Craft, and with Cabildo’s librettist Nan Bagby Stephens, bring each of these works to life. Alves’ commission of Eilende Wolken was Beach’s first specially commissioned work, an endorsement from the singer who performed in the premiere of the Mass. Beach and Craft performed a number of her works while touring Europe to revive Beach’s solo career and promote her compositions. The powerful and challenging Jephthah’s Daughter may have been among their concert repertoire. Craft’s voice must have made quite an impression over the years of their European tour, as Beach mentioned Craft when she discussed ideas for opera in the early 1900s. When Beach did take on composing an opera in the 1930s, she chose a libretto by a female playwright and fellow MacDowell Colony artist Stephens.
Eilende Wolken, Segler der Lüfte, op. 18 (1892)
Amy Beach’s first dramatic work, the scena and aria Eilende Wolken, Segler der Lüfte (“Wandering clouds, sail through the air”) was also her first commission. In the spring of 1892, just a week after the premiere of her Grand Mass in E-flat major with the Handel and Haydn Society, one of the Mass soloists, C. Katie Alves (1862–1927), contacted Beach requesting a dramatic solo with orchestral accompaniment:
I have spoken continually since my return home, and intended to write and ask you whether you had written anything in the form of an aria suitable for my voice – you know how such little, for contralto, with orchestra we have for concert use – A grand dramatic Rec. and Aria – can range from the lower g to high B flat – I would be perfectly delighted to have such from your pen, as you so well understand how to write for the contralto voice.4
Beach chose a dramatic text from Friedrich Schiller’s play Maria Stuart (1801), a dramatization of the final days of Mary, Queen of Scots, as she laments her imprisonment for treason by Queen Elizabeth I.5 After she accepted the commission, recognition of Beach’s compositional talent continued to roll in: she put the dramatic aria on hold to focus on her second commission, the Festival Jubilate, op. 17, to celebrate the opening ceremonies of the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Finally, with Alves as the featured singer, Eilende Wolken, Segler der Lüfte, op. 18 (called Mary Stuart in the original orchestral manuscript),6 was premiered on December 2, 1892. The premiere was conducted by Walter Damrosch and accompanied by the Symphony Society of New York, the first time that ensemble had performed the work of a female composer.7
Eilende Wolken begins with a brief orchestral overture followed by an introductory scena blending sections of recitative and arioso as the exiled queen reflects on her imprisonment. It is in this scene that the “Auld Rob Morris” folk theme first appears, a touch of Scottish color and a leitmotivic reference to the homeland of embattled royal Mary Stuart. “Auld Rob Morris” is introduced by the oboe (m. 79), establishing a brief call and response between the woodwinds and Mary singing “There, where yon misty mountains rise in grandeur, / I can my empire’s border see” (Example 10.1).
Example 10.1 Eilende Wolken, Segler der Lüfte, mm. 79–95.
Following the scena, the aria with the title text “Eilende Wolken, Segler der Lüfte” [“scudding clouds, sailors of air”] begins, and the “Auld Rob Morris” theme returns two more times. In a cabaletta-like section, a spirited Vivace with pictorial blasts of hunting horns, Mary reminisces about the freedom of hunting in the woods with her friends. The echoes of the horns remind her of a “well-remembered voice … resounding over the highlands,” and the oboe reemerges with the “Auld Rob Morris” theme weaving through galloping triplets (mm. 233–40). Finally, the theme appears augmented in the strings as Mary reprises her “Eilende Wolken” aria and bids farewell to Scotland in the coda (mm. 296–301).8
This concert aria also represents a significant first in Beach’s compositional style. The use of “Auld Rob Morris” is the first time Beach quotes folk music in her compositions, something she would come to do regularly throughout her career. Her works that borrowed from or were inspired by Gaelic folk songs and texts include her popular “Gaelic” Symphony, op. 32 (1897), Five Songs with texts by Robert Burns, op. 43 (1899), the piano character piece “Scottish Legend,” op. 54, no. 1 (1903), “Shena Van,” op. 56, no. 4 (1904), The Fair Hills of Éiré, O! op. 91 for piano (1922), and a later setting of the “Fair Hills” tune as her final published work and only composition for solo organ, Prelude on an Old Folk Tune (1943).9
Initial critical reception of Eilende Wolken was mixed. A correspondent for the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung found the aria emotional and moving, a critic for the American Art Journal called it “a powerfully written work of decided dramatic feeling and expression and one that would do credit to any composer,”10 and a reviewer for the New York Sun lauded it as “worthy of any but the very greatest composers.”11 Even international reviewers found plenty to appreciate, with a critic for the Hamburger Fremdenblatt providing a positive review of the vocal–piano score that was published promptly after the premiere. Praising the construction of the principal theme, the reviewer encouraged singers to seek out Beach’s work for a satisfying challenge: “The aria demands for an adequate rendering the ripest knowledge and a wide vocal compass.”12 Other reviewers were more critical, with one from Harper’s Weekly calling the aria “decidedly disappointing,” noting Beach’s apparent immaturity as a composer with her aria giving “evidence of more future promise than present fulfillment.”13
After its premiere, Eilende Wolken was rarely programmed with full orchestra, but the piano–vocal version was given occasionally by Beach and others. After the premiere, Beach accompanied vocal soloists performing the work twice, in 1894 and 1903.14 The Chromatic Club of Boston, founded by Beach’s compatriot Edward MacDowell, performed the aria on a March 8, 1901, concert, where the Club made Beach an honorary member. On March 15, 1901, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ross Jungnickel presented the “Woman in Music Grand Concert,” sponsored by the United Women of Maryland. The program included Beach’s Eilende Wolken – the second performance with orchestra – and the Graduale from her Grand Mass in E-flat major, as well as works by Margaret Ruthven Lang, Cécile Chaminade, and English composer Liza Lehmann.15
Jephthah’s Daughter, op. 53 (1903)
Beach’s second dramatic work was another aria, Jephthah’s Daughter. The story of Jephthah’s daughter is related in Judges 11: Jephthah vowed to sacrifice the first thing that came out of his house as an offering to God for victory over the Ammonites, but when Jephthah approached his home, his daughter and only child greeted him dancing and playing her tambourine. Doomed to be sacrificed, she requests time to mourn, and it is this mourning scene that Beach sets in her dramatic aria with orchestra. The French poet Charles-Louis Mollevaut (1776–1844) adapted the story of Jephthah’s daughter in a biblical narrative poem published in 1824, and selections from the poem – in particular, the five stanzas appearing in Beach’s Jephthah’s Daughter – were reprinted in French poetic anthologies.16 Beach translated Mollevaut’s poem into English herself, remaining faithful to the rhyme scheme and overall structure of the original.17 Her English lyrics were translated into Italian by Isidora Martinez, a colleague of Beach’s.18 The original manuscript presents the lyrics in the following order: French, Beach’s English translation, and Martinez’s Italian translation.19 Martinez is uncredited in the manuscript, but acknowledged in the piano–vocal version – which presents only Beach’s and Martinez’s translations – published by Schmidt shortly after the aria was completed in 1903.
Jephthah’s Daughter is in a recitative and aria form. This distinction between the two major sections is apparent from the musical setting but is particularly demarcated by the text. The recitative introduction (mm. 1–37) begins with a stark, unaccompanied entrance by the soprano soloist. Lyrics in the third-person perspective set the scene: this is the final evening of Jephthah’s daughter, whose futile laments echo through “the desert wild” during her last sleepless night. The recitative continues with a disjunct and declamatory melody over churning chords in the accompaniment.
The aria section shifts to first-person perspective; now, we hear Jephthah’s daughter herself. Beach’s translation preserves the ABAB rhyme scheme of the original poetic text; the A rhyme changes in each stanza, but the B remains the same.20 Subdivisions within the aria section are marked with changing tempos and styles, as Jephthah’s daughter confronts the inevitability of her sacrifice and searches for emotional resolution. Beginning in F-sharp minor and marked Largo con molto espressione, the aria opens with accompaniment that evokes the descending tetrachord of lament arias such as Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament,” as the singer mourns that she must die, comparing the impermanence of her life with a flower and reflecting that her friends will go on to have children but “Great Jephthah’s name must die” with her.
Though this aria is through-composed, Beach creates a sense of structure through her adherence to the rhyming structure of the original poem and the return of the aria’s opening melodic gesture (m. 45) throughout. Susan Mardinly and Clarissa Aaron have observed that while the aria’s opening melody is “distinctly Near-Eastern … Aida-like,”21 with a sense of “familiarity to the modern educated listener,”22 suggestive of other works with somewhat Orientalist aesthetics, both scholars agree that this motive is neither a quotation of, nor inspired by, an existing melody (Example 10.2).
Example 10.2 Jephthah’s Daughter, mm. 44–53.
An abrupt transition in the middle of the aria, beginning in m. 89, accelerates the tempo and destabilizes the harmony as the singer strives for justification, to find sense in her death and pray for strength for her family. The climax of the aria is reached in Beach’s setting of the final stanza, as the singer pleads for God to bless her father with the years that she would have lived. This selfless emotional plea ends with the singer peaking on the highest note of the aria, a fortissimo C flat held for three measures, over three-quarters of the way through the work (m. 158).
The aria closes in G-flat major with a return to the recitative-like qualities of the opening section, with a marking of Largo and declamatory, unaccompanied entrances. The singer’s resolve in the text, satisfied that she shall “learn to die” as long as her death is not in vain, is reflected in the transformed major key and stabilized accompaniment.23 Block posits that the overall “downward thrust” of the aria contributes to a sense of tragedy and futility, despite the major-key final resolution.24
While there is no known commission nor a dedication that hints at the occasion for this composition, Clarissa Aaron has observed that the particular challenges of this aria – the nearly two-octave range, dense accompaniment, and a lengthy and loud dramatic high note late in the work – would make it well suited for Beach’s friend and collaborator Marcella Craft, or a singer with a voice like hers. The translation of the lyrics into Italian may also support this theory, as Craft was active as a performer in Germany and Italy.25 Eilende Wolken, Jephthah’s Daughter, and some of Beach’s other important contemporary works, like her Violin Sonata, op. 34 (1896), Piano Concerto, op. 45 (1900), and Piano Quintet, op. 67 (1907), were part of Beach’s European tour in the 1910s, where she was accompanied by Craft as a traveling companion and occasional performing partner. While Jephthah’s Daughter was published as piano–vocal score promptly after its premiere, the manuscript copies of these works in full score were inadvertently left behind when Beach and Craft fled Europe at the start of World War I. Beach was eventually able to recover the manuscripts, but not until another European trip in the 1930s.26
Scholars have explored the possibility of biographical connections between Beach’s life and her creative choices, especially when tantalizing parallels between her personal life and her musical subjects emerge. Adrienne Fried Block argues in favor of a potential biographical interpretation for Jephthah’s Daughter. As in some of Beach’s compositions in the early 1900s, especially the Piano Concerto, Block interprets Jephthah’s Daughter as having a theme that points to potential strife in the relationships between Beach, her husband, and her mother. Block compares the “pathos” and the parallel relationship between a dead (or soon-to-be-dead) daughter and her father in Jephthah’s Daughter to an earlier song by Beach, “Jeune fille et jeune fleur” (1885) that she made into a central motive in the Piano Concerto. Block supports this interpretation with an additional personal connection gleaned from a 1986 interview with David Buxbaum (son of Beach’s close friend and collaborator, mezzo-soprano Lillian Buxbaum) when she observes, “the reference to Jephthah’s daughter, who would die childless, had resonance for Beach’s life: after seventeen years of marriage, there were still no children, nor would there be any, something she may have regretted.”27 Other scholars are more skeptical of a direct biographical interpretation of the aria. Aaron denies a biographical reading, pointing to an article published in The Etude where the interviewer William Armstrong states that, aside from occasional requests or commissions, “she composes when she feels the inclination moves her to it.”28 But, Aaron does allow for salient points of emotional camaraderie between Beach and Jephthah’s daughter: “childlessness, namelessness, and resolve in the face of patriarchal control.”29
Cabildo, op. 149 (1932)30
Beach was interested in American opera for many years before she started composing Cabildo. She mentioned in a 1915 interview that there was “a great deal of untouched material for musical inspiration in the works of our American poets,” but lamented the lack of acceptable topics from events in American history “for the simple reason that it is all too recent for the necessary haze of romance to have been sufficiently drawn over it. How ridiculous it would be for example, to attempt to put Lincoln or Grant on the stage in an opera.” She suggested a few alternatives:
There are, however, some picturesque moments in our history which might be made use of for opera texts, particularly those connected with Indian life and with the Spanish settlement of California, where many beautiful and suggestive incidents are to be found. But here of course we are dealing with something which is not typically American from the point of view of our generation.31
She may have had in mind some recent works by American composers, such as Mary Carr Moore’s opera Narcissa, or The Cost of Empire (1909), about a massacre of Mormon missionaries set in the Oregon Territory, or even Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (1910).32 Beach’s opinions, and the operas of her contemporaries, capture the many ways that white American composers were attempting to navigate the dual local and exotic qualities of African American and Native American music traditions in their efforts to locate a uniquely American musical identity. Native American and African American music traditions have the aesthetic advantage of sounding appealingly exotic to Beach’s fellow New Englanders with British or German origins, while allowing composers to claim ownership of the music as representative of the United States by virtue of its origin within the geographic confines of North America. In the interview, Beach concluded that she did not believe that the future sound of American music would be significantly shaped by Native American and African American music and topics.33
Beach’s concept of what is “typically American,” while she did not clearly define it, seems to be founded on the Anglo–German–Dutch cultural roots of the Northeastern United States. Continuing her suggestions about more suitable topics for operas reveals her preference for stories that are connected to the Northeast:
On the other hand the old New York legends of Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane and similar old American stories might make good material for opera, as they contain a great deal that is really American. The situations and character we can understand fully as they hail from the foundation of the modern American nation, whereas Indian and Spanish-California themes must ever remain to a great extent foreign to our innermost feelings.34
Both Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow (whose main character is schoolmaster Ichabod Crane) had been used as subjects for English-language operas in the late nineteenth century: George Frederick Bristow’s Rip Van Winkle (1855) and Max Maretzek’s Sleepy Hollow, or The Headless Horseman (1879).35 Beach clearly believed audiences in Europe and the (primarily Northeastern) United States could relate to foreign operas featuring ancient Roman and Egyptian royalty, or Italian peasants, but not to any characters or stories from African American or Native American culture presented in English.
Furthermore, while Beach’s characterization of her suggested stories as “old New York legends” is a bit misconstrued, it is revealing. She clearly thinks of these stories as old legends because they have the feeling of stories that, in their topic and narrative, mimic some qualities of folklore. Rip Van Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) were stories published by American author Washington Irving (1783–1859). Both of Irving’s stories make use of fairy-tale tropes – tricksters, ghosts, and pastoral settings – that are common in German, Scandinavian, English, and Irish tales seeded into American culture by European colonists. While the stories are closely related to North America’s colonial era in time and sensibility, they do not quite constitute a US folklore.36
Beach may have been considering ways to write American opera as early as 1914. As she returned from a concert tour of Europe with her friend and collaborator Marcella Craft, the prima donna of the Munich Opera, a shipmate and reporter for Musical America asked Beach whether or not she was likely to write an opera.
“Shall you ever write operas?” I asked. Her face lit up … “How did you know about that?” she smiled. “If you looked among all that manuscript in my trunk in the hold, it’s quite possible you might find some beginnings along that line. I want very much to write an opera some day and hear Miss Craft sing in it. That would be work worthwhile.”37
Considering that Beach had just spent three years touring in Germany and Italy, reveling in what she described as the “tremendous respect”38 of art music in the everyday lives of Europeans, it is likely that the opera she may have begun sketching for Craft would have been quite different in scope or topic from Cabildo.
She continued along these lines in a 1917 interview, also for Musical America, where she discussed the potential role of women composers in the postwar years. When asked about balancing her concert and composing activities, she admitted that in the summertime when she returns to New Hampshire to compose, she mostly creates smaller works:
For anything large scale I need a path quite clear of more or less distant concert duties and obligations. After a few more years of travel and recital-giving, I may settle down for a big, sustained effort – an opera, perhaps, if I can obtain a fine libretto. But I am much too enthusiastic a traveler yet to settle down, too fond of my audiences to give them up.39
By the time she arrived at her studio in the MacDowell Colony to begin her opera, with an apparently “fine libretto” in hand, decades had passed since her initial statements on the genre, and her concept of American identity and musical style had developed in response to the changing sonic landscape around her.
The source of Cabildo’s libretto was Nan Bagby Stephens’ one-act play of the same name. Stephens (1883–1946) was a playwright, author, composer, and educator from Atlanta, Georgia, whose mentor and neighbor was author Joel Chandler Harris, better known by his pen name “Uncle Remus.” Harris coached her in writing his style of African American dialect, a prominent feature of Stephens’ novels and plays. The play Cabildo was premiered on September 28, 1926, by the workshop company at Le Petit Theatre Vieux Carré in New Orleans, a theater just across the across the street from the Cabildo building that served as the setting of the play.40
Cabildo was presented again on March 1, 1930, along with two other one-act plays as part of the student theater troupe’s midwinter program at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, where Stephens attended school and later taught playwriting. The College’s yearbook, The Silhouette, provided program information and a photo of the performance (Figure 10.1). Since Agnes Scott was, and still is, a women’s university, all the parts in this performance were played by the female students. The feature in The Silhouette provides additional information about the setting and staging. The “scene” is described as a “ground floor prison cell with courtyard beyond, the old Cabildo, New Orleans.” The temporal shifts in the plot were described with the additional note that the stage was “darkened to denote the passage of time.”41
Figure 10.1 Program and Photo of Cabildo by Nan Bagby Stephens, presented by the Blackfriars of Agnes Scott College, 1930.
Cabildo’s single act is divided into three sections: a Prologue, set in the “modern day”; a main Scene set in January 1815, on the eve of a climactic battle during the War of 1812; and a short Epilogue returning to the modern-day setting. After a brief overture, the Prologue introduces two newlyweds, Mary and Tom, on a tour of the Cabildo in the present day. The Barker, their melodramatic guide, tells the story of Pierre Lafitte and his escape, suggesting that the pirate may have had help from a mysterious lover. Mary’s imagination is captured by the suggestion of a forbidden love story between a dashing pirate and noble lady, so she remains behind in Pierre’s cell, falling asleep and dreaming of the events of 1815.
The lights dim and rise as the wails of imprisoned pirates sound through the Cabildo. After bribing the Gaoler, Pierre and his lieutenant Dominique You discuss their plans to free the pirate and the false accusations that led to Pierre’s imprisonment. Pierre was accused of stealing a bracelet from Lady Valerie and then sinking the ship taking her to France to cover the crime. Pierre claims the bracelet was exchanged with Valerie as a promise of love, and he resolves to die to atone for his inability to save her. At this moment, she appears to him as an apparition, begging him to live and join the defense of New Orleans as a hero to clear his name. In the climactic scene, Pierre and Valerie sing a heartfelt love duet, and as her ghost departs, she lifts the latch on the cell, allowing Pierre to escape.
In the brief Epilogue, Tom returns to the cell to find Mary asleep. She awakens convinced that her dream is the true ending to the story of Pierre Lafitte and Lady Valerie. The opera closes with the two newlyweds singing about the power of love, both theirs and that of Pierre and Valerie.
While it is unclear how it came to be chosen as the opera’s libretto, Cabildo and its author are aligned with Amy Beach’s creative life. Stephens was a fellow MacDowell colonist, whose stories were set in the everyday life or historical events of the American South. Cabildo has appealing historical elements that fit within Beach’s previously stated criteria for American opera: a plot rooted in American history (but not relying on Native American or African American themes), authored by an American, and with the additional assets of a light melodramatic romance and a setting that prompts the incorporation of distinctive folk songs. Beach likely would have found collaboration with Stephens to be both practical and satisfying, relying on their mutual creative respect and expertise to undertake this new endeavor.
Additionally, the potential for Cabildo to be developed as an opera suitable for a college or workshop seems designed from the outset. Perhaps in response to beginning this project during the Great Depression and acknowledging that demands for grand opera performances would have declined, Beach and Stephens may have speculated that the modest cast and accompaniment of Cabildo and prior success in workshops and colleges as a play could fulfill the needs of an emerging market serving college programs, opera workshops, and radio opera programming.
Amy Beach’s record of composing Cabildo reveals elements of her regular compositional process at work. Beach borrowed from her own body of work for melodies, approached new folk tunes through harmonizing at the piano, and relied on the familiar backbone of piano and voice to produce an initial draft of the opera quickly. Spending part of each summer composing at a prodigious pace at the MacDowell Colony, she maintained a steady output of songs and smaller pieces, while her larger works could remain unpublished for years as she continued to refine them.
Beach recorded notes about her compositional process in her diaries. For many years, she kept five-year diaries that featured small spaces to write daily notes and reflections for the same day each year. Beach’s entries commonly consist of brief notes of the work she did that day, the weather, performances, social visits, and – when at the MacDowell Colony – the types of birds she heard outside her studio. (For example, see Figure 10.2.) Beginning in the early 1920s, Beach visited the MacDowell Colony for at least a month every year. She frequently expressed that she was at her most productive while she was at the Colony; from her first visit in 1922 onward she sketched or completed nearly every work she published in a year during the month that she spent there each summer.42 According to her diary entries for June 1932, Beach began work on the opera as soon as she arrived at the Colony.43 She had received the libretto from Stephens before her trip and began working piecemeal on sections of the opera. With the freedom to focus entirely on composition, she completed the initial sketch of Cabildo in just eleven days.
Figure 10.2 Amy Beach diary entry for June 11. The 1932 entry begins, “Finished opera sketch. Nap! Lunch outdoors. Anagrams in [evening].”
Her entry for June 1, 1932, recorded that her first task for the day was working on Cabildo, starting with a love theme borrowed from her own works. She noted, “Began on opera (Nan’s book). Took sop. aria first, using ‘When Soul is joined.’”44 This “aria,” indicated for the soprano role of Valerie, would eventually become “Ah, love is a jasmine vine,” the climactic scene of Cabildo sung by Valerie before she is joined in duet by Pierre. Beach continued to make progress and by June 3 turned her attention to the “scene between Pierre and Dominique.” While she does not specify, it is potentially a reference to the expository scene explaining the circumstances of Pierre’s imprisonment and the plan by Pierre’s brother Jean and the Lafitte pirates to free him. Beach’s record of compositional activities for June 4, “worked hard,” is more vague, but she was most pleased to receive “Creole folk tunes and a dear letter” from Stephens.45 She spent the next day having “great fun harmonizing Creole tunes.” While there is no record of precisely which tunes Stephens sent to Beach, she incorporated several Creole folk tunes and dance rhythms throughout Cabildo, demonstrating her familiarity with their musical idioms.46
Throughout her career Beach borrowed a variety of folk tunes in her piano and chamber compositions.47 She usually familiarized herself with new folk material by setting it for piano, or piano and voice, gaining a sense of its rhythm and style. Beach explained in a 1917 interview that her autodidactic compositional techniques involved listening and score study in order not only to understand the style and construction of a work, but to integrate and internalize it to the point where she felt that it belonged to her and fit seamlessly into her own individual mode of expression.48 Despite being her only opera, Beach’s development of Cabildo is still representative of her process to create large works, including her lifelong habits of study and integration followed by composition.
Beach completed a sketch of the overture on June 7 and must have felt quite confident in what she had accomplished during her first week at the Colony, since the next day she asked Mrs. MacDowell for permission to invite Stephens to hear the early version of the opera later that month. Finally, on June 11, 1932, Beach cheerfully reported, “Finished opera sketch. Nap!” (Figure 10.2).
Stephens arrived at the Colony on the evening of June 25, and the next day Beach performed the opera for Stephens, who was “too delighted for words,” “perfectly satisfied [with] [the] theatrical aspect of [the] work,” and “adores the music.” Pleased with the reception of this performance, Beach gave it again for approximately twenty-five people in her studio, to “much appreciation” from her audience. The next day, Beach and Stephens continued to work on the opera, with Beach remarking in her diary that it “grows better!” On the final day of Stephens’s visit, June 28, Beach and Stephens toured the grounds of the MacDowell Colony and continued to work on the opera before Stephens left early the next morning. After completing the sketch and the “details” of her first opera in only a month, Beach left the MacDowell Colony for the summer on June 30, 1932. With the initial draft of the opera complete, Beach continued to compose out the orchestration to include violin and cello parts that mostly mirror similar lines in the piano.
Beginning in the 1940s, Beach and Stephens began to plan a premiere for Cabildo near Stephens’s hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. In a letter to Beach, Stephens recounted a recital of the University of Georgia Glee Club accompanied by the chamber music ensemble, led by College of Music director Hugh Hodgson (1893–1969). In addition to performances by the chamber orchestra and some vocal soloists, the group also staged a one-act operetta, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury (1875). Stephens said, “the more I heard, that night, the more convinced I was that Mr. Hodgson could give our opera a beautiful premiere,”49 generous praise for a school that began student opera performances only in the 1930s. Afterwards, Stephens approached Hodgson about premiering the opera at the University of Georgia. She forwarded Hodgson’s response to Beach, noting that he wished to see a score and – as a pianist himself – he was likely to be enticed by the prominent piano part in the accompaniment.
After Beach agreed to premiere Cabildo with Hodgson at the University of Georgia, Stephens wrote that she was thrilled at the progress, especially since Beach planned to attend the premiere, tentatively scheduled for March 1941. Stephens again lauded the quality of the student performers in the chamber music group, calling the instrumentalists “really outstanding.”50 Her praise hints that Hodgson was planning to request – or had already requested – permission from Beach to expand the original piano trio score for the premiere performance.51 Stephens also offered to use her local contacts to increase the event’s visibility. She wanted to approach other university music directors about Cabildo as soon as the premiere had been scheduled at the University of Georgia and discussed using her connections with the Atlanta arts scene to ensure that critics from local papers and national music periodicals would be able to attend and review the premiere to raise the profile of their opera.52
It soon became evident, however, that progress toward a premiere had stalled. Stephens wrote to Beach in March 1941 that Hodgson and the Glee Club were on tour until the end of the month and that preparation for the premiere would start as soon as the group returned, but Hodgson had not given her firm production dates; Stephens hypothesized that they would be in late April or early May. Perhaps due to restrictions on funding, travel, or other scheduling conflicts within the university’s music program, the opera would not be premiered at all that year.
Whatever the reasons, Hodgson was unable to arrange a premiere before Beach’s death, and the first performance of the opera was given at the Pound Auditorium at the University of Georgia on February 27, 1945, just two months after Beach passed away from heart disease. The University of Georgia issued a press release announcing the premiere, and a short article promoting the performance appeared in the student newspaper, The Red and Black, on February 23, 1945. This article reported that Cabildo, paired with Pergolesi’s comic intermezzo La serva padrona (1733), would be staged at the university’s music department. This announcement also mentions Hodgson’s expanded orchestration of Cabildo that included “sixteen stringed instruments and piano.”53 The evening’s performance featured a mix of students, alumni, and faculty performing both on stage and in the accompanying orchestra.
A lengthy review of the opera, including photos from each performance, was published in the March 4, 1945, issue of the Atlanta Constitution. Reviewer Marguerite Bartholomew was impressed by the music department’s staging of the premiere, describing the event as an “epoch-making success.” Bartholomew also highlighted the local interest of the performance, describing Stephens as a “gifted musician and playwright of Atlanta.”54 Acknowledging Beach’s recent death, Bartholomew provided a brief, eulogistic vita highlighting her accomplishments as “America’s foremost woman composer” and confirming Beach’s credentials in choral writing by calling attention to her anthem Christ in the Universe, op. 132, recently performed by Beach’s church in New York, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal. Bartholomew described how Beach had completed the opera at the MacDowell Colony and credited Stephens with taking the lead to bring the opera to Hodgson’s attention. She also confirmed that Beach gave permission to Hodgson to alter the score, adding “parts for viola, double-bass, and French horn, employing an instrumental ensemble of 16 in addition to the piano,” although aside from naming a few instruments and the total number in the ensemble, she did not provide any more specific information about the instrumental performers. These parts have since been lost. The same chamber orchestra, under Hodgson’s direction, provided accompaniment for both Cabildo and La serva padrona.
Bartholomew praised the “fine momentum” and “ecstatic climaxes in the dream scene” created by Beach’s use of rhythm, melody, and harmony. She noted that the vocal declamation and harmony seemed reminiscent of Wagner and observed that several “old French [sic] folk songs that give attractive local color” had been woven throughout the score. Overall, the premiere was received as a success by the enthusiastic audience, with a “special ovation” for the librettist and guest of honor, Nan Bagby Stephens.55
Sometime in 1945, Hodgson returned the loaned manuscripts of Cabildo to the New England Trust Company in Boston, the executors of Beach’s estate. Following Beach’s death, Henry Austin from the Schmidt Company attempted to locate the Cabildo manuscript through Beach’s close friend, the soprano Ruth Shaffner; evidently, when Hodgson returned the scores to the New England Trust, he had inadvertently stymied Austin’s efforts to bring the scores to the Schmidt vaults in order to complete the publication of Beach’s final works in the years following her death. Eventually, the manuscript scores and parts were sent to the MacDowell Colony according to the terms of Beach’s will, which specified that they should benefit from her work. These manuscripts, and other archival materials of Beach’s, were eventually purchased from the Colony by the University of Missouri–Kansas City in 1972, where they remain today.56
“Vital Peculiarity”: Creole Music and Cabildo
Amy Beach combined musical material from several sources to craft the romantic, Creole-tinged setting of Cabildo. A few prominent themes appear for the first time in the Overture and Prologue sections, during the Barker’s exposition of the legend of Pierre and Valerie, allowing the musical motives associated with the events of the story introduced at the beginning to be repeated and developed later in the Scene. Among the most frequently repeated motives are the ones based on Creole folk songs and dances, including themes associated with Pierre and the ball where Pierre and Valerie fell in love. These folk-based elements are woven together with music borrowed from Beach’s own oeuvre and set within the advanced expressive and harmonic language Beach explored in her late works.
At some point Beach prepared a study of Creole folk music, focusing on distinctive rhythms and instruments. These “Notes on Creole Folk Music,” which Beach may have presented to the local Hillsborough Music Club, consist of three typewritten pages with handwritten musical examples.57 While these notes are filed in the Amy Beach Collection at Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire in the same folder as the incomplete sketch of the opera dated June 1932, the “Notes” are undated.
In her “Notes,” Beach commented that the “vital peculiarity of Creole folk music lies in its rhythms, the most frequently recurring of which is the rhythm of the habanera time.”58 Beginning with Spanish and French influences on the English contredanse, a popular social dance imported into European colonies in the Caribbean, the habanera developed through the early 1800s, picking up a distinctive dotted ostinato accompaniment introduced by Black musicians in Cuba (Example 10.3a). The habanera, or contradanza habanera, is named after Havana, where it was a popular dance among all classes. A dance for couples with slow and sensual movements, its influence can be found in other Latin American genres like the Argentine tango. In the late nineteenth century, the “exotic” style and unmistakable rhythm of the habanera were reexported to French and Spanish composers and made famous in works such as Bizet’s opera Carmen.59
Example 10.3a Habanera rhythm written in Amy Beach’s “Notes on Creole Folk Music.”
Example 10.3b Cabildo, The “Governor’s Ball” theme with the habanera rhythm in the bass, mm. 294–301.
The habanera rhythm occurs multiple times throughout the score of Cabildo as an icon and an index of dance, appearing whenever characters mention the fateful Governor’s Ball where Pierre and Valerie danced and fell in love (Example 10.3b). It is one of a few themes, aside from Lady Valerie’s motive and Pierre’s “noble pirate” motive, to occur in both the present-day Prologue and the 1815 Scene. This familiar dance rhythm becomes an indicator of the union between Pierre and Valerie, and between the diverse styles that have contributed to the music of the United States, persisting through time in both the past and present-day scenes of the opera.
Beach goes on to explain that “the origin of the habanera and of the syncopated waver in its rhythm is due to America having been settled by Spaniards, Portuguese, and French. Also the Indian has had something to do with influencing Creole music, and the African slaves have contributed some of their drum language to it,” alluding to the multiple cultural influences present in the folk music of New Orleans.60 Beach’s final comments offer a generalization of the different themes that are prominent in the texts of Creole music:
With the exception of a few nursery rhymes, the Creole knows only love songs. The few exceptions, hardly worth naming, are satirical songs, some comic darky tunes (even here a love theme is sure to be interwoven), [but] that is all. The only patriotic songs are the so-called national hymns of which there happen to be a few; the others are marches of stereotyped variety, and most of them have not a trace of national character. The love songs are sung by old and young, and are appreciated at a tender age by these people who mature so early.61
Even though her analysis now sounds simplistic or ethnocentric, Beach made use of many of these musical topics or themes in Cabildo. The first recognizable motive of the opera, which appears in the overture, is folklike and references a satire song of a fancy ball held by the upper class.62 She also borrows the melodic and rhythmic contour of a love song, “Belle Layote,” as Pierre Lafitte’s primary musical motive. A generic anthemic- or patriotic-style topos, characterized by an ascending line leading to a sustained high note on the word “America” in the libretto, acts as another motive to indicate the patriotic defense of New Orleans by the pirates. The only directly quoted folk song is a translation of the Creole song “Quan’ mo ’te d’un grand chimin,” a tune with a folk or minstrel-like trope of a comic beggar, sung by the Gaoler.
In many ways Cabildo is consistent with Beach’s style. The opera’s tuneful melodic lines, rich harmonic colors, and sometimes unexpected key changes reflect the style that she had developed for herself throughout her career. When asked her opinion about modern trends in the new compositions of the twentieth century, Beach was dismissive of modernist works with “unceasing dissonance”63 or the “purely intellectual … of deep interest as problems … but never for a moment touching our emotions.”64 Despite her reluctance to embrace the extended harmonies and techniques favored by ultramodernists and serialists, Beach never stagnated in a conservative Romantic milieu. She continued to be influenced – consciously or unconsciously – by the expressive potential of the modern music around her. Her late choral works, such as Canticle of the Sun, op. 123 (1924); Christ in the Universe, op. 132 (1931); and Hearken Unto Me, op. 139 (1934), utilize extended harmonic functions in vocal works for dramatic effect, pairing “progressive tonality” with an intended emotional resolution from struggle to transcendence.65 Cabildo demonstrates this expressive approach to harmony and key relationships, eschewing traditional motions between key areas for dramatic effect, evoking composers such as Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler who used tonality for expressive, rather than structural, ends. G major and its closely related keys, with chromatic diversions interspersed, are the foundational key areas for the Prelude and Epilogue, while the dream sequence that makes up the majority of the opera explores distant harmonic territory, with the climactic moment of the opera arriving in the key of G flat.66 The disjunction in time (or reality) between the outer scenes in the modern day and the past of Mary’s dream is reinforced through the use of these distant keys.
Beach continued to develop her style in response to the music she heard around her, an ever-expanding world colored by jazz, Modernism, popular music, and the shifting definitions of what constituted art music. Initially, she had expressed reservations about the incorporation of jazz and non–Anglo-American folk music into compositions touted as “American,” especially when it came to opera.67 In Cabildo, however, Beach demonstrated a personal definition of American music that had expanded from her early comments about suitable sounds and subjects, to include traditional music of an iconically American place that was quite distant from her New England base, as well as a complex and expressive harmonic language that was not so distant from other modern composers’ dramatic works.
Conclusion
While these dramatic works constitute only a small part of Beach’s oeuvre, they represent landmarks in her lifelong creative and compositional process. Beach’s infrequent choice to compose in dramatic genres – staged or unstaged – and conservative choices of text when she did, suggest a lingering Bostonian skepticism toward the theatrical, balanced by her prolific composition of chamber, choral, and church music. Nevertheless, her talent for vocal writing matched to dramatic texts, akin to her ballads and art songs, shines through.
Tracing the arc of these dramatic works through Beach’s career reveals a steadily maturing composer wielding an ever-expanding harmonic vocabulary to great dramatic effect. Beginning with the first instances of “Auld Rob Morris” in Eilende Wolken, Beach’s use of folk music for its distinctive colors and dramatic effects became a hallmark of her style, in addition to her economical borrowing and reinterpretation of her own previously composed songs. Despite her categorization as a primarily Romantic-era composer, the works she created during the twentieth century demonstrate that she continued to be cognizant of new musical styles and the tastes of performers and audiences, and that she made the effort to incorporate these into her compositions. The history of each of these dramatic works, and Beach’s partnerships with Alves, Martinez, Craft, and Stephens, also correspond to Beach’s work with female artists throughout her career. She supported, mentored, and created compositions with female poets, artists, composers, and performers throughout her life, forming an extended “family” of talented women who were shaping the future of American art.
