Amy Beach was a prolific composer for the piano. As a teenager, she had a blossoming career as a concert pianist curtailed by her mother, who did not wish her to tour, and her husband, who encouraged her to compose. Beach herself wrote that while she made the switch to focusing on composition upon her marriage at the age of eighteen, she, at the time, had thought herself “a pianist first and foremost.”¹ This aptitude as a pianist comes through in her piano compositions: Beach wrote fluidly for the piano, knowing the instrument intimately herself. Her pieces range from simple, more pedagogic works, through to character pieces and virtuosic works requiring an advanced piano technique. This chapter will explore Beach’s prodigious oeuvre for piano solo, concluding with a brief discussion of her pieces for organ, piano duet, and two pianos.

The Early Piano Pieces

Beach’s musical gifts were obvious from an early age: she was singing before she could speak, had perfect pitch, and had a remarkable musical memory. Her mother kept her away from the family piano until she was four, as she did not want Beach to have the life of a musical prodigy. Mamma’s Waltz, her earliest extant piece for piano, along with Snowflake Waltz and Marlborough Waltz, were “written in her head” while visiting her grandfather’s farm in Maine.² Beach herself notated Mamma’s Waltz several years later in the manuscript that survives, with the annotation, “Composed at the age of four years.”³ Mamma’s Waltz is in simple rondo form, with two interspersed sections contrasting with the opening material.⁴

Beach’s mother limited her time at the piano and began to teach her piano formally only at the age of six. By seven, Beach was playing Bach fugues, Chopin waltzes, and a Beethoven sonata, as well as performing in public. She was offered contracts by several concert managers, all turned down by her parents. In 1875 her family moved to Boston, and in 1876 Beach began to study privately with the pianist Ernst Perabo, who taught at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Several pieces survive from this period. Menuetto (1877), Romanza (1877), and Air and Variations (1877) were all written when Beach was ten years old. Menuetto is a precursor of the Menuet italien, op. 28, no. 2. The first half of the piece is in rounded binary form, followed by the main theme presented in the parallel minor. A short harmonic progression leads to the final phrase, a restatement of the theme that ended the binary section. Romanza shows Beach experimenting with modulation as she moves skillfully from the opening key of D major into F-sharp major eight bars later.

Air and Variations is a larger work and evidence of Beach’s technical development as a pianist. The theme is first presented simply in A minor. The variation that follows requires repeated-note facility in the right hand. The second variation moves into F major with sextuplet patterns and then returns to A minor for an energetic presto variation. A final variation, with the melody in the left hand accompanied by groups of four running up and down the keyboard, brings the set to conclusion.

Petite Valse (1878) is a charming waltz in D-flat major, a forerunner of the Danse des fleurs, op. 28, no. 3. Beach uses a structural organization similar to Menuetto: a binary form is followed by a move to the parallel minor, with a nicely handled modulatory sequence back to a statement of the opening melody in D-flat major.

Moderato, an undated piece in handwriting similar to the pieces just mentioned, so perhaps of a similar date, survives in manuscript with a single bar at the bottom of the first page lost due to a torn corner (completed by the author on her recording of this piece).⁵ The mood Beach creates with Moderato is magical: the static writing, with a rising arpeggio in the first part of every bar leading to longer melodic notes, and subtle shifts of harmonic color come together to form a miniature gem.

In 1882, Beach began studying piano in Boston with Carl Baermann, a pupil of Liszt’s. Her mother permitted her to make her debut in 1883 at the age of sixteen with Ignaz Moscheles’s Concerto No. 2 in G minor in Boston’s Music Hall. Beach performed as a recitalist and concerto soloist in and around Boston for the next several years, though her mother did not allow her to tour extensively, nor would she permit her to go to Europe for further study.⁶

Piano Pieces Composed After Her Marriage

Upon her marriage in 1885, Amy Marcy Cheney became Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. Her husband did not wish for her to accept performance fees, but he did allow her to play in aid of charities and encouraged her development as a composer. Beach’s next surviving work for piano is an excellent Cadenza (1887, published 1888) written for the first movement of Beethoven’s third piano concerto.⁷ Nine pages in length, it uses scales, octaves, and trills to explore Beethoven’s motives in a most effective manner, requiring virtuoso technique.

Beach’s next solo work, Valse Caprice, op. 4, was premiered in 1889 by the composer herself. The figuration of the opening introduction is as if a curtain is being raised at a ballet. And then the dance begins. Beach decorates the melody with light grace notes, lending an improvisatory and capricious air to the work. The piece was championed by the pianist Josef Hofmann (1876–1957), who used it frequently as an encore.

Beach uses her song, “O my luve is like a red, red rose,” op. 12, no. 3, as a basis for her wonderful Ballade, op. 6 (published 1894). Following a brief introduction, the melody enters, accompanied with flowing triplets between the hands. After setting out the theme, Beach begins again, initially in D-flat minor, with the melody in the left hand. The decoration in the right hand becomes more elaborate and passionate, with beautiful piano writing. An Allegro con vigore ensues, portraying Robert Burns’ words of the third stanza of Beach’s art song: “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear; And the rocks melt wi’ the sun; I will luve thee still, my dear; While the sands of life shall run.”⁸ Bold and tempestuous, this builds in a fervor of emotion to a climax. From the sustained unison octaves emerges a pianississimo Lento, a quasi-cadenza on the opening melody. The material from both sections is combined, building to a final statement of the theme in large chords and octaves. Utterly depleted, Ballade winds down, fading into the distance, ending exquisitely still.

Sketches, op. 15 (published 1892), is a four-movement work, each piece preceded with a line of poetry. The first, “In Autumn,” is annotated, “Feuillages jaunissants sur les gazons épars” [“Yellowed leaves are scattered on the grass”], an excerpt from a poem by Alphonse de Lamartine. In F-sharp minor, it is jaunty and light, reminiscent of Schubert. At the beginning of the second piece, “Phantoms,” Beach quotes a line by Victor Hugo: “Toutes fragiles fleurs, sitôt mortes que nées” [“All the fragile flowers die as soon as they are born”]. “Phantoms” is in 3/8, in ABA form, with an emphasis on the second beat of the bar, lending a mazurka-like feel.⁹ “Dreaming” quotes another excerpt by Hugo, “Tu me parles du fond d’un rêve” [“You speak to me from the depths of a dream”]. It opens with triplet figuration between the hands, which continues throughout, with long notes conveying the melody. Another quotation from Lamartine is used under the title of the virtuosic final piece, “Fireflies”: “Naître avec le printemps, mourir avec les roses” [“To be born with the spring, to die with the roses”]. Passages in double thirds in the right hand convey the flitting of fireflies as they light up the night sky. This piece was played by Ferruccio Busoni, Josef Hofmann, and Moritz Rosenthal, giving evidence of the spread of Beach’s works during her lifetime.

Bal Masque, op. 22 (1893, published 1894), is a waltz in the Viennese tradition. It demonstrates Beach’s affinity with the form, having heard her mother play Strauss waltzes at the piano from her infancy. In ABA form, the first section is preceded by a short introduction establishing the key of G major. The middle section in E-flat major is warmer and more intimate in sound. Beach decorates the “A” material in the restatement of the theme, imitating various woodwind instruments in her working of the material. Her orchestral arrangement of this work is discussed in Chapter 8.¹⁰

Trois morceaux caractéristiques, op. 28 (1894), opens with “Barcarolle,” a lovely evocation of a boat-song. In 6/8 time, the undulating left-hand accompaniment provides an ongoing support for the cantabile melody. Set in ABA form, the middle section introduces a new melody in the left hand, which is developed expansively with full chords. After reaching a climax, Beach backs away, with a tranquillo setting of this melody ushering in an embellished restatement of the opening theme. The second piece, “Menuet italien,” is an expanded version of Beach’s childhood Menuetto. Beach uses much of the same material, but in a more complex way, adding passing tones and secondary lines. It is a larger work: there is now a middle section in C minor, with artfully written passagework decorating the line. “Danse des fleurs,” marked Tempo di Valse, is the final morceau. In D-flat major, the opening theme dances between the hands. The second theme, with a longer line, is beautifully presented in the key of C-sharp minor. Clever motivic development, requiring pianistic dexterity, builds to a climax before Beach returns to the opening melody to finish lightly.

Some Pedagogic Pieces

Often the line is blurred between pedagogic and concert repertoire, epitomized by Beach’s two sets of pieces for “children.” While they may be less complex than her longer and technically challenging larger works, the pieces are worthy and appealing as concert program fillers or encores. It takes a master to write simply but effectively, and Beach shows her skill in these charming, delicate, and nuanced pieces.

Children’s Carnival, op. 25 (1894), is a set of miniatures that depict a carnival festival using characters whose roots lie in the Italian commedia dell’arte. The set opens with a march, “Promenade”: the procession of entertainers through city streets. Next is “Columbine,” a quiet piece inspired by the character of a young woman, sometimes portrayed as the lover of Harlequin. “Pantalon,” the next movement, is based on the eponymous character, an older man who is often cast as the father of Columbine. “Pierrot and Pierrette” follows, a gentle waltz in two parts, each section repeated. Pierrot and Pierrette are two clowns: Pierrot is desperately in love with Pierrette, but she falls in and out of love with him. “Secrets” is a lovely andantino with the melody hidden between the hands, a duet of two voices juxtaposed on different parts of the beat. Children’s Carnival concludes with “Harlequin,” the acrobat of the menagerie, conveyed in a quick, light melody that dances around the keyboard.

Children’s Album, op. 36, was written in 1897,¹¹ the year after the premiere of Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony and the composition of Sonata in A minor for piano and violin. A suite of pieces in classic musical forms, it opens with “Minuet,” a charming composition in three parts. The first section is in rounded binary form, followed by a trio and then the return of the opening section. The next movement, “Gavotte,” harks back to the French court dance of the same name. In “Waltz,” Beach sets a long melody over a waltz pattern in the left hand for this gentle reminiscence in ABA form. The fourth movement, “March,” is a sprightly dance of dotted rhythms with the odd three-bar phrase thrown in to set the marchers off-kilter. A lively “Polka” ends Children’s Album: marked scherzando, a sense of fun pervades as the phrases bubble one after the other.¹²

The Beginning of the Twentieth Century

Beach’s first solo piano piece of the twentieth century is Serenade (1902), a beautiful transcription of Richard Strauss’s Ständchen, op. 17, no. 2.¹³ Beach’s handling of Strauss’s material transforms the original work in a highly compelling transcription for piano. She cleverly incorporates the sung line in among the rippling accompaniment, beautifully rendering Strauss’s setting of the words by nineteenth-century German poet Adolf Friedrich von Schack. The opening stanza is in the same register as Strauss’s original, but the second verse is set down an octave by Beach, with occasional forays into the upper register of the piano to end vocal phrases. In the next section, when Strauss moves into D major, Beach begins with the melody in octaves in the bass of the piano to take the listener into “the twilight mysterious under the lime trees.” The piece is mostly faithful to the original score except at the climax, where Beach expands the material in a most effective way: she includes extra bars of arpeggiation and doubles the duration of the vocal pitches, as well as adding a pianistic flourish at the end.

Beach had a keen interest in folk music, evidenced in many of her compositions, including the first of the Two Compositions, op. 54 (1903). “Scottish Legend” is an original melody, evocative of Celtic origins, rising thrice as it builds to a peak before a denouement to the tonic D minor. The solemnity of the first section is juxtaposed with the slightly more animated middle section, in D major. “Scottish Legend” concludes with a truncated restatement of the opening, marked dolcissimo. The second piece, “Gavotte fantastique,” is based on the “Gavotte” of Children’s Album, op. 36: Beach uses this as a springboard for a more advanced showpiece. Trills and octaves enhance the template already established to make this a fantastical tour de force.

Variations on Balkan Themes, op. 60 (1904), is one of Beach’s seminal works for piano. Written in 1904, it is a substantial piece based on folk melodies that were introduced to Beach by Reverend William Washburn Sleeper and his wife, missionaries to Bulgaria. At a talk that Beach organized, Rev. Sleeper played some folk melodies that the couple had collected in their travels. Beach transcribed four of the melodies from memory several days after the presentation and used them as the basis for Variations, which she took just over a week to write.¹⁴ Beach wrote an orchestral version of the variations in 1906, including an extra variation.¹⁵ She revised the piano score of Variations in 1936 for her publisher, taking out repeats, transposing the funeral march and final statement into E-flat minor, and shortening the coda. Beach arranged the work for two pianos in 1937, using the 1936 version and including two extra variations. The following discussion is on the original version of 1904.¹⁶

The piece opens in C-sharp minor with a quiet chordal setting of the main theme, a Serbian folk melody entitled “O Maiko moyá.”

Beach restates the last line again, “Over whose fresh grave moanest thou so?” painting an especially bleak picture of utter melancholy. Beach continues in C-sharp minor for the first three variations. Variation I is a canon, with the left hand following the right in imitation; the second variation is a grand expansion of the theme, marked maestoso, with three beats to the bar; and the third variation is a light allegro in duple meter. For the next variation, a barcarolle, Beach moves to B-flat minor: beautifully set in binary form, parallel thirds and sixths support the melody over a simple accompaniment. The fifth variation, in G-flat major, begins with the left hand alone. In the tenth bar the right hand enters with decorative trills. The next phrase, now in E-flat minor, is again for left hand alone, with the right hand joining in after eight bars in a descant trill.

Variation VI opens in F-sharp minor with another Balkan melody, “Stara Planina.” Translated as “Old Mountain,” Stara Planina is the mountain range that divides northern and southern Bulgaria. This folk tune acts as an introduction, “quasi-fantasia,” to the actual variation on “O Maiko moyá,” which is marked Allegro all’ Ongarese [in Hungarian style]. As the sixth variation continues, Beach moves to F-sharp major and introduces a new melody, “Nasadil e dado” [“Grandpa has planted a little garden”]. This tune is taken into A major before returning to F-sharp minor to conclude the variation.

Beach returns to “O Maiko moyá” for variation VII, a slow waltz in E major. Variation VIII is a funeral march. There is a long introduction to the march based on the folk melody “Macedonian!” a mountain cry for help. “Macedonian” provides a desolate backdrop for the entry of a low trill, the rumble of which undergirds the funeral march. “O Maiko moyá” is stated simply in E minor, becoming grander and more tragic as the variation develops. The dotted rhythms of the march, coupled with full chords and tremolo in both hands, make the funeral procession a momentous occasion that builds to a climax before unraveling down to low trills in the bass of the piano, ending as quietly as it began.

An extensive cadenza follows, heralded by a quiet reflection on “Stara Planina.” Lovely arpeggios and passages in thirds ensue, leading to a section alluding to the maestoso of Variation II. Octaves and massive chords usher in a grand presentation of “Stara Planina,” which then winds its way down to a beautiful, still restatement of “Macedonian!” The opening theme returns, with Beach diverging from the original at the end of the third phrase, moving seamlessly into C-sharp major for the final cadence.

Beach’s interest in folk music continues to be evident in her use of Alaskan Inuit tunes in Eskimos, op. 64 (published 1907, revised 1943).¹⁷ The four pieces are based on melodies Beach found in a discourse by anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942).¹⁸ “Arctic Night” opens starkly, with the melody “Amna gat amnaya” first in unison between the hands and then supported by lush harmonies. Beach references “Song of a Padlimio” as the second melody, with its distinctive outlining of a minor seventh chord. The sprightly energy of “The Returning Hunter” comes in contrast, again beginning simply with an Inuit melody of the same name before being harmonized. A second Inuit tune, “Haja-jaja,” comes partway through, celebrating the nourishment brought by the returning hunter. In “Exiles,” headed lento con amore, Beach sets the folk tune “Song of the Tornit” and later uses “The Fox and the Woman” as a second melody. “With Dog-teams” opens with “Oxaitoq’s Song,” then races ahead in a lively presto based on “Pilitai, avata vat,” painting a brilliant picture of huskies skimming across a snowy landscape.

Begun in 1906, Les Rêves de Colombine: Suite française, op. 65, was completed in the spring of 1907, the same year in which she later finished her masterful Quintet for Piano and Strings in F-sharp minor.¹⁹ In Les Rêves de Colombine, Beach takes the French pantomime character Columbine, usually depicted as the daughter or servant of Pantalon and in love with Harlequin, as her inspiration. Beach uses traditional forms (prelude – gavotte – waltz – adagio – finale: dance) in the organization of her suite of Columbine’s dreams. In the first of these pieces, “La Fée de la fontaine,” Beach has Columbine visualizing the fairy of the fountain. Beach remarked that it was about “a capricious, a fierce and sullen as well as gracious fairy.” This is followed by “Le Prince gracieux,” a gavotte that imitates a prince who has caught Columbine’s eye dancing gracefully and lightly. The next piece, “Valse amoureuse,” is a romantic waltz, where Columbine dreams of “a sweetheart with whom she is dancing.”²⁰ Beach used material from her song, “Le Secret,” op. 14, no. 2, as a basis for the waltz. This is followed by “Sous les étoiles,” a slow serenade in which Columbine gazes at the stars and dreams of love. The final movement, “Danse d’Arlequin,” opens with a snippet of “Valse amoureuse,” and then Harlequin jumps in, whirling about in a light, high-spirited dance. A more dreamlike transition follows with arpeggiation between the hands, leading to material from the first movement. Harlequin then returns in his dance, building to a frenzied climax. Columbine is reminded of her sweetheart with material from “Valse amoureuse” before Harlequin finishes the movement with a flourish of his dance.

After Her Husband’s Death

The second decade of the twentieth century was a pivotal time in Beach’s life: her husband of twenty-five years died in 1910 and her mother died soon after, in February 1911. Later that year Beach left for Europe, not returning until 1914. Several of her piano pieces were written in Europe. The Tyrolean Valse-Fantaisie, op. 116, was begun in the Tyrol in 1911 and completed in Munich in 1914.²¹ It was performed in Boston in December 1914 upon Beach’s return from Europe and was published much later, in 1926. This concert piece begins in descending unisons, the bare bones of the fantasy melody, which soon emerges pianissimo in the right hand. Beach explores this simple motif sequentially, using extended harmonies and chromatic decoration. This improvisatory section ushers in the first waltz melody, related to the opening fantasy melody in the descending minor third outlined by the upper notes. The second waltz melody is the folk song, “Kommt ein Vogel geflogen.” The two melodies are then combined, with the first waltz in the right hand and the second in the left. The third melody in this quasi-rondo form of waltz melodies is “Rosestock Holderblüh.”²² This tune is introduced on its own, then combined with “Kommt ein Vogel,” before the return of the first melody. After a pause, Beach writes a grandiose section of full chords and octaves, which leads to a passage around the opening fantasy figure. “Kommt ein Vogel” is heard once again, accompanied by trills this time, before the music returns to the expansive chordal melody for more development. The opening material reappears, now introducing the coda – a masterfully constructed tour de force that includes all the main waltz themes in a final dance frenzy.

Prelude and Fugue, op. 81, was begun in 1912 during Beach’s stay in Germany, performed in Boston in 1914, then published by Schirmer in 1918. The letters of Amy Beach’s name (A. BEACH) inspire the piece, referencing Liszt’s Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H (1871), with four letters shared between Liszt’s theme and Beach’s (B flat, A, C and B natural [designated H in German]).²³ Notably, Beach studied with Carl Baermann, a pupil of Liszt’s, in Boston from 1882 to 1885. In her work, Beach uses A-B-E-A-C-H both in opening the Prelude, written like a fantasy, and in the fugue subject. The prelude is sectional, and the theme is first presented in low octaves with sextuplet flourishes following in both hands. The theme is then set in full chords over sustained bass A octaves, marked fortissimo. This leads to a dolce cantabile section of development, first in arpeggiated figures, then in chromatic thirds, followed by more left-hand figuration accompanying the transposed theme in the right hand. A bombastic octave sequence follows, which builds to a climax followed by silence. Then beautiful ppp arpeggios in both hands usher in a quiet chordal reminiscence of the theme. Beach creates a very special moment, and in that mesmerizing stillness comes the fugue. In four voices, Beach presents the subject very simply with eighth-note accompaniment patterns. The tempo then becomes slightly faster, and a triplet underlying rhythm is introduced, with each voice again brought in in layers. The next section uses a sixteenth-note accompanying pattern with a lively countermelody, which is then developed. After a build-up using this material, Beach brings the whole piece down to ppp, with an octave ostinato pattern in the left hand (based on the countermelody) undergirding a choral development of the subject. This grows, and maestoso octaves of mounting fury lead to a grand statement of the theme in low octaves, the countermelody second subject in upper right-hand chords, and sixteenth-note octaves running between the two voices. Truly Lisztian in both technique and the way three hands are suggested but only two employed, Beach is in her finest compositional form writing the passagework that brings this work to culmination. It is an impressive concert work and one of her most important piano compositions.

Return to the United States

Having worked through her grief, traveled, and promoted her music through public performance, Beach came back to the US sure of herself and with newfound zeal for her work. Under management, she toured the country playing her chamber music, vocal pieces, piano solos, and the piano concerto. In 1916, Beach made her permanent base in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, the birthplace of her mother, living with her cousin and aunt. She had an article published in The Etude magazine later that year, detailing her perspective on piano performance and technique.²⁴ In it she advocated for intuition in interpretation: “one’s technical equipment in any art should be sufficiently elastic to allow free adaptation in whatever direction our tasks lead us.” She encouraged developing the tools of the trade: “Of course, we must have technic, and plenty of it. In order to express our own thoughts, or adequately those of others, we must first acquire a sufficient command of language.” Beach was a natural pianist and was opposed to “hard and fast” rules in imposing particular techniques; indeed, the ultimate goal was to purvey musical meaning: “We must adapt the method used to each separate phrase, according to its musical and emotional significance.” It is worth keeping that in mind in approaching her pieces – that she herself would wish pianists to become intimately acquainted with the notes, finding their own way of bringing the music to life. “Each one [piece] has its own story to tell, and the technic must be suited to the telling. Here we come to the real value of technic: a means of expression.”

From Blackbird Hills, op. 83 (published 1922), subtitled “An Omaha Tribal Dance,” is another adroit piece based on folk material. The Omaha are a Native American tribe of the American Midwest. From Blackbird Hills is based on a children’s song, “Follow my leader.”²⁵ It opens with the tune in duple meter, lively and quick, the melody first in the right hand and then in the left. This is followed by an Adagio that uses the same folk melody, but in an expanded rhythm with underlying harmonic development. The opening section returns but then falls into a sequential development that leads to a truncated return of the Adagio. A presto coda based on the opening of the piece brings From Blackbird Hills to a brilliant finish.

Fantasia fugata, op. 87 (published 1923), is a larger work, a concert fantasy based on the traditional prelude and fugue format. It opens with a flourish of octaves preceded by grace notes, a motive that later forms the basis of the fugue subject. Beach wrote that this gesture was inspired by Hamlet, “a large black Angora who had been placed on the keyboard with the hope that he might emulate Scarlatti’s cat and improvise a fugue theme.”²⁶ The extended opening section uses the grace note motif to explore harmonic sequences with arpeggiation. This section acts as a “prelude” to the more extensive fugal section that follows. In three voices, the fugue begins with underlying eighth-note rhythms supporting the theme. The next section uses sixteenth notes to develop the material sequentially. This is followed by a second theme, a rising subject with a somewhat jazzy rhythm, also presented in three voices. The earlier sequential development of the first theme returns, moving through different harmonies, to lead to a grand final statement of the fugal theme in left-hand octaves, followed by the second subject in right-hand octaves. Fantasia fugata ends with a tremendous final cadence, a satisfying conclusion to a well-crafted concert piece.

Beach penned a piano transcription of “Caprice” from The Water-Sprites, op. 90 (1921), originally written for flute, cello, and piano. Just under a minute long, Beach’s transcription effectively amalgamates the three instrumental parts, with the right hand covering the running sixteenth figuration and some of the flute interspersions, and the left hand imitating the pizzicato cello line. The transcription is two bars longer than the original and deviates slightly toward the end, becoming in its own right a piece beautifully written for piano.²⁷

The MacDowell Colony

In 1921, Beach began her long relationship with the MacDowell Colony, spending the summer composing at their retreat in Peterborough, New Hampshire. She found the quiet and closeness to nature inspiring and the contact with other artists, writers, and musicians at the Colony refreshing.

The Fair Hills of Éiré, O!, op. 91 (1922), takes as its melody the Irish American folk tune “Beautiful and Wide are the Green Fields of Erin,” which Beach was introduced to by Padraic Colum while at the MacDowell Colony in 1921.²⁸ “Ban Chnuic Eireann O” begins: “Take a blessing from my heart to the land of my birth, And the fair hills of Eire, O!” Beach sets the melody first with a simple accompaniment, then she writes a quiet chordal triplet pattern for the right hand and lets the left take the melody. The piece becomes more virtuosic with thirty-second-note figuration introduced. The melody first comes in the middle voice, then in big chords with arpeggio sweeps in the left hand. A simple, evocative statement of the folk tune ends this lament for the homeland.

A Hermit Thrush at Eve, op. 92, no. 1, and A Hermit Thrush at Morn, op. 92, no. 2, were composed in 1921 at the MacDowell Colony. Beach writes in a footnote that the birdcalls “are exact notations of hermit thrush songs, in the original key but an octave lower,” heard at the MacDowell Colony. At the top of A Hermit Thrush at Eve are lines by John Vance Cheney:

The piece, in E-flat minor, begins in the depths of the piano and rises, with an undulating triplet pattern of great beauty emerging over an eighth-note accompaniment. The melody comes in, sweetly singing above the gentle movement, to create an atmosphere of utter tranquility, a prayerlike state suggested by the poem. The song of the thrush enters, freely notated in grace notes, floating on the dusk air. Beach brings the main tune back in, and then more thrush song, creating an absolutely gorgeous piece of music with profound depth. A Hermit Thrush at Morn quotes J. Clarke: “I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush sing hymns of rapture, while I drank the sound with joy.” In D minor, this piece is written as a slow waltz. The thrush song is evident from the start, being part of the melodic impetus. It is in quasi-rondo form, with the second and fourth sections being more dramatic and developmental, moving through extended harmonies.

From Grandmother’s Garden, op. 97, also written at the MacDowell Colony in 1921, is a suite of five pieces in which each movement represents a wildflower. The first, “Morning Glories,” has fast arpeggiation between the hands with the melody set in the first note of each left-hand group as it sweeps up. The ripples depict the flower by the same name, which is fleeting and short-lived: the blossom usually lasts just for the morning. “Heartsease” is quiet and beautiful, painting a picture of the flower also known as Viola tricolor. The soothing melody comes three times, first in the middle register, then an octave lower, and finally in the right hand over a beautifully written descending bass line. “Mignonette” is translated “little darling” and is a plant with tiny, fragrant flowers growing on tall spikes. Yellowish white in color, its Latin name is Reseda, “to calm,” and it was utilized by the Romans to treat bruises. Beach writes this exquisite little piece in the style of a minuet, apropos for its title, “Mignonette.” “Rosemary and Rue” are flowers that connote remembrance. A nostalgic movement, Beach sets a gentle chromatic melody over a simple left-hand chordal pattern to represent rosemary. Beach uses rue for her second theme, written as a sustained melody in the left hand with quiet eighth-note accompaniment in thirds. “Honeysuckle” is a fast waltz, à la Chopin’s Minute Waltz. Honeysuckle as a plant is a climber, with long tendrils that twine around anything handy. Beach twines the melody round and round, like the honeysuckle, in running right-hand patterns.

Two Pieces, op. 102, was published in 1924 and dedicated to Olga Samaroff (1880–1948). The first piece, “Farewell, Summer,” has at the top lines that read, “O last of the free-born wildflower nation! Thy bright hours gone and thy starry crest: Three names are thine, and they fit thy station, Frost Flower, Aster and Farewell Summer, But Farewell Summer suits thee best!” The title of the piece, therefore, has a double meaning: it is saying goodbye to the summer months as well as depicting the flower of the aster family called Farewell Summer. Beach writes the first section of the piece in the style of a gavotte, with a light, playful character. The middle section is more introspective and marked legatissimo, with the melody in the middle voice and an eighth-note accompaniment in both hands lulling the listener in a dreamlike manner, remembering the days of the summer. The second piece, “Dancing Leaves,” is exactly that, a cascade of leaves dancing in the autumnal breeze. Marking the tempo molto vivace, Beach uses chromaticism, a light accompaniment, and staccato patterns of parallel thirds and fourths to paint the picture perfectly.

One of the retreats at the MacDowell Colony, the Alexander Studio, provided inspiration for the Old Chapel by Moonlight, op. 106 (published 1924).²⁹ Crafted in stone, with arched windows and doorway, the building sits in the wooded landscape, much as the simple chorale tune that comes in the middle of the piece sits among the elegant parallel seventh chords that form the opening and closing sections.

Amy Beach’s affinity with the piano as a performer comes through in her writing of Nocturne, op. 107 (1924).³⁰ The piece opens on the dominant octave and takes four bars of progression using seventh, diminished, and augmented harmonies to arrive at E major. The melody is introduced in the middle voice with low bass notes tolling the first beat of the bar and supporting chords on the second half of each beat. Beach moves the melody between the voices, building to an appassionato climax of full chords in both hands, making this a very wakeful “night piece” indeed! The dreams or passions of the night having subsided, the piece ends quietly in slumber.

A Cradle Song of the Lonely Mother, op. 108 (published 1924), is, as the title suggests, a lullaby from a mother who is lonely, caring for her baby on her own. The rocking accompaniment undergirds the melody that Beach develops freely in the right hand. This undulating motion subsides, and the middle section of the piece emerges ppp. A lovely pattern of two notes in the left hand against three in the right supports the new melody in the middle voice. Trills usher in the return of the opening theme, which becomes fuller and more decorated. The melody of the middle section returns as the coda in this most atmospheric piece.

From Olden Times, op. 111, a gavotte for piano, is unfortunately lost. The title is included on two lists of works, in Beach’s own hand, as a manuscript and unpublished.³¹

By the Still Waters, op. 114 (1925), refers to Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters …” Beach was baptized into the Episcopal church in 1910 several months after her husband’s death. She wrote, “the greatest function of all creative work is to try to bring even a little of the eternal into the temporal life.”³² This piece is a tranquil portrayal of the still waters of Psalm 23 and the reassurance that comes later in the Psalm of one’s soul being restored, with no fear of evil, and goodness and mercy pervading the rest of life.³³

Another Set of Pedagogic Pieces

In 1922, Beach and two local teachers started a Beach Club for children in Hillsborough, NH.³⁴ She dedicated From Six to Twelve, op. 119, nos. 1–6 (1927), to “the Junior and Juvenile Beach Clubs of Hillsborough, N.H.”³⁵ The pieces are character studies, with the titles indicative of the music that follows. The first and last, “Sliding on the Ice” and “Boy Scouts March,” are in rondo form, with lively patterns depicting children frolicking on the ice and marching jauntily in step respectively. “The First May Flowers” is a simple waltz in ABA form. “Canoeing” conveys the gliding of a boat through water with the melody in longer notes surrounded by the moving water of broken chords. “Secrets of the Attic,” in three-part form, has outer sections that whisper, “I have a secret …,” and a middle section that insists it will not divulge the secret no matter what! “A Camp-fire Ceremonial” is solemn, with a low A gong sounding under the still chordal melody of the first and last sections. The middle section of the piece is perhaps the rite itself, conducted in moonlight in a circle around the campfire.

The Second European Visit

Beach visited Europe once again in 1926–27, beginning in Italy and finishing with six weeks in Paris. Her writing of A Bit of Cairo (published 1928) was perhaps influenced by seeing the Egyptian treasures at the Louvre and also by the success of the Harvard University–Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition to Egypt in 1927. The piece alludes to Debussy’s Golliwogg’s Cake-walk in the main theme and stylized accompaniment, with the opening jaunty melody taken through a myriad of keys.³⁶

Three Pianoforte Pieces, op. 128, and Out of the Depths, op. 130, were both written at the MacDowell Colony in June 1928. The Three Pianoforte Pieces (published 1932) are dedicated to Marian MacDowell, wife of composer Edward MacDowell and good friend of Amy Beach. The pieces are reminiscent of the woods in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where the MacDowell Colony is located. Beach herself performed the pieces for Eleanor Roosevelt at a White House concert in 1936. The first, “Scherzino: A Peterboro Chipmunk,” is a character piece with an energetic chipmunk scampering to and fro, up and down, in and out of the trees. The second, “Young Birches,” impressionistic, with parallel fourths and extended harmonies, paints a picture of the breeze caressing the leaves of the birches, shimmering and calm. “A Humming Bird” finishes the set, with Beach using fast notes between the hands to capture the little bird flitting from flower to flower, collecting nectar in a blaze of color.

Out of the Depths, op. 130 (published 1932), carries the subtitle “Psalm 130,” which begins, “Out of the depths I have cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.”³⁷ The beginning of this piano piece evokes the hopelessness and cry for help that open Psalm 130. The development of this melody perhaps portrays verse five, “I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in His word do I hope.” Beach builds to a climax of petition, with a flurry of notes adding weight to the plea for help. The piece ends quietly, in full submission to a greater will beyond human understanding.

Later Solo Works

A September Forest was most likely composed in 1930 during a stay at the MacDowell Colony.³⁸ The rising theme of the opening bars paints the picture of a quiet, beautiful woodland haven. The serenity and inner peace she must have felt at her retreat are revealed in the hymn-like melody that comes halfway through the piece. This melody builds to a ff climax of grandeur with full chords and resonating bass octaves. It then winds down to a simple restatement of the opening woodland theme. Beach used A September Forest as the basis for Christ in the Universe, op. 132, a vocal work with orchestra.

The Lotos Isles (c. 1930) is based on Beach’s song of the same title for soprano and piano published in 1914 as Op. 76, No. 2.³⁹ The text for the song is from Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters.” Beach writes an additional introduction and coda for her piano piece and only obliquely refers to the melody of the song. The piano piece uses the accompaniment pattern from the song, but here it is developed as melodic material. Also, the piano piece is in ¾ time, while the song is in 4/4. So, while there are strong similarities, the piano piece stands on its own as a work and is not a transcription of the vocal piece.

Beach arranged Far Awa’, the fourth of her Five Burns Songs, op. 43, for piano in 1936.⁴⁰ The song text is from Robert Burns’ poem of 1788, “Talk of Him That’s Far Awa’,” and is about a woman longing for her sailor lover. In the piano version, Beach first states the vocal melody in the middle voice, with right-hand chords on the offbeat in syncopated accompaniment. The same melancholic tune is then presented in the top voice and developed sequentially with full chords that build to a climax. The loneliness of the woman left behind is captured beautifully, with the piece ending in quiet resignation after her plea for rest: “Gentle night, do thou befriend me, Downy sleep, the curtain draw; Spirits kind, again attend me, Talk of him that’s far awa!”

The Improvisations, op. 148 (1937, published 1938), were composed by Amy Beach at the MacDowell Colony, writing to a friend that they were “really improvised” and that each “seemed to come from a different source.” The first, in ternary form, atmospherically explores augmented and diminished harmonies, the phrases sequentially moving forward yet seemingly suspended in time. About the second improvisation Beach said she was remembering how she “many years ago sat with friends in an out-door garden outside Vienna and heard Strauss waltzes played.”⁴¹ The third is marked Allegro con delicatezza and consists of a playful melodic pattern over a light chordal accompaniment featuring extended harmonies with quartal implications. This is followed by a very slow piece of three long phrases, each beginning the same but then diverging in their quest, a pure G-flat major resolution being found only at the end. The last improvisation is a sort of kujawiak, a slow mazurka, with the emphasis in this piece being primarily on the second beat of the bar. The grandeur of the opening develops with broad chords and full use of the range of the piano, the fff climax subsiding into a pp restatement of the opening.

Music for Piano Duet

Allegro appassionata, Moderato, and Allegro con fuoco are three pieces Beach wrote for piano duet as a teenager.⁴² With youthful exuberance, the theme from Allegro appassionata is later developed by Beach in her solo piece, “In Autumn,” op. 15, no. 1. The second piece, Moderato, is marked “cantabile” and is beautifully introspective, evidencing Beach’s early skill in harmonic nuance as she begins in D-flat major and deftly moves to G major before returning to the tonic. Allegro con fuoco is in 6/8, with a continual eighth-note pattern in the left hand undergirding a lyrical melody in the right.

Beach arranged Largo, the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, for piano duet as a gift to her husband on their second wedding anniversary, December 2, 1887.⁴³

Summer Dreams, op. 47 (1901), is a set of six character pieces for piano duet. “The Brownies” refers to a girls’ club of that name; “Robin Redbreast” “reproduces exactly the song of a robin”; “Twilight,” marked largo religioso, is preceded by a poem by Beach’s husband; “Katy-dids” is a light imitation of jumping grasshoppers; “Elfin Tarantelle” is a lively dance of the fairies in 6/8; and lastly “Good Night,” a quiet closing piece.

Music for More Than One Piano

Variations on Balkan Themes, op. 60, for two pianos, as referenced earlier, was arranged in 1937 using the 1936 version and including two extra variations. Published in 1942, it is in two halves: both parts start with the theme and then are followed by a set of variations each.⁴⁴

The score to Iverniana for two pianos, op. 70 (1910), is unfortunately lost, but there is evidence that it was later rewritten as Beach’s Suite for Two Pianos Founded upon Old Irish Melodies, op. 104 (1924). This is a large-scale work in four movements. The first, “Prelude,” is marked Lento quasi una fantasia. Exploratory in nature, there is beautiful interplay between the pianos with advanced technique required. “Old-time Peasant-dance” follows, an Allegro con spirito where the dance melody is presented in Piano II, with Piano I then entering with a second, more lyrical Irish melody. The third movement, “The Ancient Cabin,” with trills, arpeggiations, scales, and octaves, is an expansive fantasy around its Irish folk melody. The concluding movement, “Finale,” is a demanding piece, with the theme alluded to in introductory material, then set between the pianos in fugal fashion and effectively developed with compositional aplomb.⁴⁵

Organ

The organ was used to accompany many of Amy Beach’s choral compositions, but there is very little for solo organ. Beach wrote an organ version of Far Awa’ in 1936, in the afternoon of the same day she wrote her piano arrangement (discussed earlier).⁴⁶ The organ version is very similar to the piano, though Beach here uses sustained pedal tones to underlay harmonic structures, and the left-hand accompaniment from bar 31 is more pressing, with continued emphasis on the offbeat.

Prelude on an Old Folk Tune (“The Fair Hills of Éiré, O!”) (1942, published 1943) was based on the same Irish folk melody as her earlier piano piece, op. 91.⁴⁷ However, the organ work is a completely new setting of this melody, with expansive harmonies and much chromaticism in the accompaniment.⁴⁸

Summary

Beach wrote, “I never remember when I didn’t compose. … Family anecdotes have it that I began at the age of four.”⁴⁹ Music was a first language to Beach, and this innate ability to communicate musically comes throughout her entire oeuvre, from Mamma’s Waltz to the Improvisations, op. 148. She heard music in her head; melodies naturally came to her and were not contrived. Beach’s harmonic language developed from the simple progressions in her early keyboard work, through a broader romantic harmonic base, and then into more expressionistic tonalities. Her piano writing grew from basic Alberti bass patterns and chordal accompaniments to pieces requiring advanced piano technique and bravura performance. Throughout, Beach’s love of melody shone through with long lines and overarching shape, making her music captivating, appealing, and listenable.

The keyboard works range from small character pieces to the large Balkan Variations, but what there isn’t per se is a sonata, set of etudes, or series of preludes. Beach was a Romantic at heart and reveled in creating pictures with her music, using themes from nature, folk traditions, and the world around her to produce masterpieces. Her particular skill in shaping and developing melodies with rich harmonic language enabled Beach to paint snapshots of life as she experienced it, whether in the woods of New Hampshire or in the Tyrol, Austria. Beach’s contribution to the keyboard literature is immense and should be celebrated for the wonderful treasure chest of piano gems that are a pleasure to hear and play.

Beach had her own keyboard voice – she was not trying to mimic the masters but brought to life music of her own making. She certainly was inspired by traditional forms such as waltzes, gavottes and minuets, and paid homage to the mainstay piano repertoire in contributing, for example, a beautiful Barcarolle, op. 28, no. 1, a passionate Ballade, op. 6, and an extraordinary Prelude and Fugue, op. 81. While similar to Liszt in being a composer/pianist, akin to Schumann in her character pieces, with technical writing versed in Chopin and expansive harmonies influenced by Brahms, Beach breathed into life music essentially her own, the synthesis of natural ability, schooled pianism, study of the masters, and disciplined dedication. Her wonderful keyboard music is testament to her greatness.

Songs were the foundation of Amy Beach’s musical world. Her mother reported that by the age of one, she could hum forty songs. By age two, she could sing harmony to any tune her mother sang. She insisted that her mother and maternal grandmother sing daily – but only songs she liked. Harmonizing with her mother’s singing was a bedtime ritual. This love of singing led to mental composition of melodies, later harmonized during her first experiences playing the piano. It was natural that she felt all music-making was “singing,” be it vocal or instrumental. Appropriately, her first publication was a song, and songwriting led to her initial fame as a composer. For decades after her death, she was best remembered for her songs. They are well crafted, most with singable melodies and integrated piano accompaniments, satisfying to both musicians and audiences.

Songs predominate her total compositional output. She composed them prolifically, even during the years she was occupied primarily with writing larger compositions. Between 1887 and 1915, several songs were published each year, almost all shortly after their composition. Performances by some of the United States’ most prominent musicians furthered the songs’ remarkable popularity and contributed to their quickly becoming standard concert, recital, and teaching repertoire. She and her primary publisher, Arthur P. Schmidt, worked diligently to promote the songs and ensure they stayed in print. Despite their popularity during her lifetime, they fell into neglect when ill health precluded her extensive travels and performances around the United States to promote them.

In the 1970s, despite a resurgence of interest in women composers, only two of her songs were available in print.¹ Renewed interest in her oeuvre focused primarily on her importance as the first successful American woman composer to create large-scale orchestral, choral, and piano works, leading to a revival of performances of her major works. Largely because it was not unusual for women of her day to compose in smaller forms, her songs remained in obscurity a bit longer. Only after several were reprinted in the mid-1980s did they begin to reclaim their well-deserved attention. As of this writing, almost all of her published songs in the public domain are available through www.imslp.org, and many songs have been republished in scholarly editions. Numerous autographs used by publishers to prepare printed editions are housed in the Library of Congress’s A. P. Schmidt Collection (www.loc.gov/collections/a-p-schmidt-collection/).

Stylistic Characteristics

From 1880 to 1941, Beach composed 121 art songs with keyboard accompaniment, of which 111 were published during her lifetime. They demonstrate her exceptionally insightful understanding of texts, mastery of the form, and awareness of trends in current European musical styles. The assumption that Beach’s songs are overly Romantic in nature, unnecessarily elaborate, and excessively sentimental has sometimes led to their cursory dismissal as being mere parlor songs. While those descriptions might be appropriate for many songs by her female contemporaries, Beach’s songs were composed as art songs. Even though the vocal lines and accompaniments of some of her songs are complex and technically demanding, they were intended to be sung and played by both amateur and professional musicians.

She believed that the mission of all art is to uplift: “to try to bring even a little of the eternal into the temporal life.”² She strove for musical expression people would understand, believing that songs should be inspired, creative, musical responses to texts – incorporation of both intellect and emotion.

Even though some critics have accused her of imitating other composers, or of composing in the style to which she had been most recently exposed, very few songs bear resemblances to those of her peers, a fact recognized early in her career. In a 1904 article on Beach’s songs, critic Berenice Thompson wrote,

Any similarities between her songs and those of other composers are more a reflection of her manifold interests and experiences than of plagiarism. Several poem settings actually predate those of her contemporaries.

Other critics have implied that her songs are all more or less alike. Closer examination reveals that, while many songs share similarities in structure, sentiment, and methods of text setting, all are quite distinctive. A hallmark of her music is extensive use of chromaticism, rooted in the ideals of German Romanticism. The application of this chromaticism was increasingly implemented within the context of more modern musical idioms, including impressionism and quasi-atonalism.

Song composition played a major role in the development of her unique musical language, providing her with opportunities for small-scale experimentation incorporating a wide variety of musical influences. Their use within this small form was subtle and controlled in comparison with more obvious inclusion of increasingly modern musical influences in her larger works. Several quotations from her writings will provide a basis for understanding her goals in song composition.

“Music should be the poem translated into tone, with due care for every emotional detail.”⁴

From earliest childhood, poetry was the foundation of Beach’s songs. Well before she could read or write music, children’s poems inspired spontaneous creation of accompanied songs. Memorizing texts came easily, as by age four, she was able to recite many long, difficult poems. This remarkable memory served her in good stead later in her method of songwriting: “In vocal music, the initial impulse grows out of the poem to be set; it is the poem which gives the song its shape, its mood, its rhythm, its very being. Sacred music requires an even deeper emotional impulse.”⁵

“I believe that a composer, like anyone else, is influenced by what he studies and reads, because literature cannot fail to react upon artistic expression in any other form.”⁶

Avid reading and continuing social contact with some of the United States’ most esteemed writers refined her literary discernment. An eclectic taste in poetry is apparent in the wide range of authors whose texts she set. Her husband may have suggested settings of poems by historically significant authors, including Shakespeare and Burns, but the majority of the songs were settings of works by living authors, many of whom were friends. More than one-third of the texts were by female writers.

French and German poetry from anthologies, newspapers, and popular magazines inspired eleven German and seven French songs. These texts provided a means for experimentation with inclusion of elements of current trends in the styles of German Lied and French chanson, as well as an opportunity to hone her skills in text settings in those languages.

Much poetry of her early songs appealed to Victorian ideals and may seem dated today. She was drawn to poems about love and nature. Love song texts in the first person were most commonly from a female perspective. Other favorite topics were times of day (most frequently twilight or night), flowers, and birds. Several songs quote or are based on birdcalls, including “The Blackbird,” op. 11, no. 3 (1889); “The Thrush,” op. 14, no. 4 (1890); and “Meadowlarks,” op. 78, no. 1 (1917).

“In vocal writing, the initial impulse grows out of the poem to be set; it is the poem which gives the song its shape, its mood, its rhythm, its very being.”⁷

Beach fervently believed that in order to interpret a song effectively, a singer must fully understand a poem’s meaning and character. To this end, she preferred that a song’s text be printed on the page before the musical score, as she shared with her publisher in a 1908 letter: “A singer can get at a glance a better idea of the character of a song by this means than by a prolonged study of words scattered thro’ [sic] several pages of music.”⁸ She expanded on her views of the importance of the text to interpretation in a 1916 article:

“A composer must give himself time to live with what he is creating.”¹⁰ “It may happen that, for instance, that one has a ‘perfect’ theme for a song. … It is quite possible that the melodic line may not seem at all suitable for the voice … the original theme may develop into something quite different from the song that was first planned.”¹¹

Songwriting was recreation for Beach. When she felt a roadblock while working on a larger piece, she sometimes wrote a song, viewing it as a special treat: “It has happened to me more than once that a composition comes to me, ready-made as it were, between the demands of other work.”¹² Her songs may have seemed to flow quickly and spontaneously from her pen, yet they often evolved unconsciously over a longer period of time, although this was not always the case.

“In writing a song, the composer considers the voice as an instrument, and that the song shall be singable should be the fundamental principle underlying its creation. Many an otherwise magnificent work lies on the shelf, unused, because it is not suitable for the voice.”¹³

What makes most of Beach’s songs so singable? Why do they practically sing themselves? The answer is most likely her remarkable sensitivity to languages’ natural inflections, even though this may not be consciously perceived by the musician or listener. Her songwriting process began by careful contemplation of the poem to be set. After memorization, mental repetition of the words’ spoken inflection led to the melody, phrase by phrase. The result: melodies that are musical representations of the text’s natural inflections, as if the pitches of the spoken word were given musical notes (Example 6.1). Division of poetic lines into two- or three-measure phrases enhances the songs’ singability as well.

Example 6.1 “Ecstasy,” op. 19, no. 2, mm. 1–14.

It is worthwhile to consider the voice types Beach had in mind for each song. This can frequently be determined by a song’s dedication. Most early songs were composed for light, high, female voices. Later in life, she favored large, dramatic female voices.

About 60 percent of the songs, most of which were for high voice, were published in only one key (much to the chagrin of those with lower voices). Because her musical response to poetry emerged in specific tonalities, with their associated timbres in both piano and vocal parts, it is preferable to sing them in their original keys. Even so, modern performers and audiences are not able to experience the exact, original, intended sonorities of the early songs, as pianos in Boston were tuned slightly lower in the late nineteenth century than they are today.

Most of her songs are in major keys, with F major, A-flat major, and E-flat major predominating. She perceived the latter two of these as blue and pink, respectively. Three lullabies composed for friends’ newborn babies made use of these color associations, with blue for male and pink for female. Curiously, given her childhood aversion to music in minor keys, thirty-three of her songs represent ten different minor modes. With very few exceptions, songs in minor modes end with (sometimes quite abrupt) major cadences.

She was highly opposed to unauthorized transpositions of her songs, as her timbral intent would be obliterated. In order to fulfill and/or increase their demand, Schmidt requested transpositions of several songs (beginning with “Ecstasy” in 1893). Alternate keys were usually lowered by a minor third. Popularity of “Ah, Love, but a Day!” and “Shena Van” warranted three transpositions. Songs with expansive ranges and high tessiture not lending themselves to acceptable transpositions were published in one key, with alternate pitches for highest and/or lowest notes.

“A composer who has something to say must say it in a fashion that people will listen to, or his works will lie in obscurity on dusty shelves.”¹⁴

Beach understood the publishing industry was purely a business matter, regulated by supply and demand. As her compositional career blossomed, she and Schmidt employed a variety of strategies to create broader demand for her music. Marketing efforts focused on songs and short piano pieces, music that would please the amateur musician and be performed frequently because of its accessibility. To appeal to this demographic, songs in foreign languages were published with English titles and singing translations printed above the original language, a common practice at the time.

Schmidt published notices and advertisements in newspapers and magazines. He also distributed his own promotional pamphlets containing effusive (sometimes misrepresentative) descriptions of Beach’s songwriting prowess. He took advantage of publicity garnered by performances of her larger works by coordinating publication of her newest songs with those events. Their inclusion on subsequent high-profile concerts furthered sales. To satisfy and increase demand, arrangements of her biggest sellers were published with violin obbligati and for various combinations of voices.¹⁵ “A Song of Liberty,” op. 49, and “The Year’s at the Spring,” op. 44, no. 1, were issued in Braille (in 1922 and 1931, respectively).

Magazines offered another effective means for promoting songs. Several were composed expressly for them, usually published with an accompanying biography and/or interview. These songs are short, with simple melodies within limited ranges and easy accompaniments.

When programming Beach’s songs, one should be aware that most of her early songs were composed as individual entities, with highly varying topics, usually unrelated. As soon as she had produced three to five songs, Schmidt published them in an opus, deciding on the order of the songs within the opus.

In 1891, after publishing eighteen of her songs, Schmidt assembled fourteen, issuing them as part of a series of song anthologies. All were subtitled “a Cyclus of Songs,” even though none of them contained song cycles. Schmidt likely hoped these publications would increase profits, as customers wanting to purchase one or two songs might be likely to pay a little more to buy a collection that included songs that had not sold well singly. After publishing another thirty-nine songs, a second anthology of fourteen songs (also part of the “Cyclus” series) was issued in 1906. Plans for a third anthology in the 1930s never came to fruition due to high costs of printing during the Depression.

It is often misconstrued that since several of Beach’s better-known songs are slow, they all share that trait. Actually, an equal number of fast and slow tempi are represented in her song output. All tempo designations are in Italian, most with added directives for their interpretation, commonly including the adverbs espressivo or espressione; tranquillo or tranquillamente.

Early songs exhibit somewhat of a formula for setting up a melody’s climactic note, usually at or near a piece’s end: an ascending vocal line leading to the highest tone is interrupted by descending movement, either stepwise or a skip, that precedes an ascending leap of at least a minor third to the high note. A song’s highest (and either loudest or softest) tone is usually set on an open vowel ([a] or [ɔ], for example), sustained for one or two measures. She certainly sensed that these open vowels are the most conducive for optimum vocal resonance in singers’ higher ranges. Frequently, though, the tone preceding the highest one is also on an open vowel. As these ascending intervals straddle singers’ upper passaggi, it is more challenging to maintain forward placement than if the high note were preceded by a closed vowel (such as [e] or [i]). These highest tones and their accompanying chords were usually assigned sudden, extreme dynamic changes, sometimes pianissimo, but more often a jolting forte or fortissimo. Musicians should consider that these sustained tones were intended to have as much “life” as the preceding material, not beginning and maintaining the same dynamic from outset to completion. For effective interpretation, to give the music shape and carry expressive movement forward, pianissimo notes should begin as a slightly louder dynamic level than specified, making a decrescendo to the level indicated. As it can be strenuous for the singer to sing and sustain a loud tone “going nowhere” expressively for several measures, as well as unsettling to the listener to be bombarded by such an abrupt, loud dynamic change, the loudest notes should begin more softly than designated, making a crescendo to the indicated fortissimo.

Facility at the piano likely contributed to her technically challenging accompaniments. Continual use of octaves and complex chords with quite differing distributions of notes in quick succession requires long fingers and comfortable hand spans of more than an octave. Accompaniments rarely double vocal melodies. Occasionally during measures of rest between vocal phrases in earlier songs, what promises to be an effective countermelody emerges, only to disappear at the voice’s reentrance. Her preference for triple and compound meters (especially 6/8) facilitated the incorporation of repeated eighth note or triplet chords/figures to increase intensity and forward motion, a device also found in her solo piano works (Example 6.2). While used to great effect in several songs, its implementation for measures (or pages) at a time resulted in their monotonous similarities.¹⁶ Endings of three chords or with ascending arpeggiated flourishes (often in sixths) became somewhat cliché (Example 6.3).

Example 6.2 “After,” op. 68, mm. 71–78.

Example 6.3 “Forget-me-not,” op. 35, no. 4, mm. 55–59.

Clearcut variations in Beach’s songs delineate three distinct compositional style periods. These correspond with three important periods of her life. The first style period begins with her first published work in 1883, “The Rainy Day” (composed 1880), and ends with the deaths of her husband and mother in 1910 and 1911, respectively. Songs composed in 1914 in Europe comprise a second style period. A third style period begins in 1916 and continues through 1941.

First Style Period (1883–1911)

As a girl, and later as the wife of a socially connected, wealthy Boston surgeon, Beach had extensive time to devote to piano practice and composing, making this her most productive period of song composition. She composed seventy-two songs during these thirty years, many of which became her best known. Notably, “The Rainy Day,” her first published song, begins with a direct quotation of the first eight notes of the third movement of Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, op. 13, transposed from C minor to F minor.

After marrying in 1885, her program of autodidactic musical study was supplemented inestimably by her husband’s careful guidance. An amateur singer and accomplished pianist, Dr. Beach had extensive knowledge and appreciation of art song literature. He shared his expertise with Amy, introducing her to masterworks of song. This deepened her understanding of basic structural elements, including forms, text settings, sensitively crafted accompaniments, modulations, shaping of phrases, and appropriate ranges and tessiture.

Dr. Beach was also an amateur poet. Amy set seven of his poems, all composed within his lifetime and dedicated “To H,” with authorship attributed to H. H. A. B. The first of these settings were the three op. 2 songs. They were certainly composed for him, as relatively low and limited ranges would have suited his baritone voice. She composed settings of his poems on his birthday (December 18), presumably as birthday presents. Manuscripts dated December 25 suggest that, after being given poems for Christmas, she made settings immediately.

It should be taken into account that late nineteenth-century pianos were usually tuned slightly lower than modern ones. The prevailing pitch standard in Boston from at least 1863 to 1900 was A = 435.¹⁷ A = 440 was not officially adopted as the universal pitch standard until the International Standardizing Organization (ISO) meeting in London in May 1939.¹⁸ As a result, many songs composed for medium voice may be deceptively difficult for today’s amateur singers, as their highest notes fall slightly in voices’ upper passaggi.

From the outset, strophic, modified strophic, and ternary forms predominated Amy Beach’s song output. All but a handful follow this uniform pattern: minimally varied melodic material for repetitions of A sections are supported by accompaniments’ substantially different harmonies. Most early songs are marked by expansive, flowing melodies and accompaniments that reflect the influence of contemporary European compositional styles.

Interspersed are several songs described as enjoyable, “if not fully apprehended at first hearing.”¹⁹ This type of song begins with four to eight measures of a memorable melody that subsequently evolves into a seemingly jagged chain of notes. This is caused by vocal parts’ frequent extraction from (or burial within) their accompaniments’ relentlessly changing harmonies. The voice sometimes provides counterpoint for the accompaniment or serves as an inner part to complete a complex chord. Rapidly changing harmonies rarely lead to predictable vocal entrances after measures of rests.²⁰ Several songs’ introductions contain descriptive figures that are repeated between vocal phrases, yet the vocal lines that follow are disjunct and bear no correlation with an accompaniment’s motive. Her usual sensitivity to natural speech inflection is absent in these songs.²¹ These rambling, pianistic songs that lack perceptible melodies show no apparent compositional models. They bring into question her later statement that she always composed away from the piano.²²

Vacillation between (often remote) tonalities necessitated the persistent use of accidentals (including frequent double sharps/flats) and enharmonic spellings (alternating between correct and incorrect spellings), making them difficult for an accompanist to read. Critic Rupert Hughes even described one of her more accessible songs as “bizarre.”²³

Prominent nineteenth-century American and European song composers generally employed evident melodies and sparse accompaniments with slow harmonic movement within conventional chord progressions. She hit her stride around 1894, composing increasingly marketable songs containing the streamlined accompaniments and flowing melodies for which she is best known.

The 1890s were her most productive years of songwriting, with publication of thirty-seven songs during the decade. Her first big seller was a modified strophic setting of her own two-verse poem, “Ecstasy” (1893). Its moderate range and simple, memorable melody in two-measure phrases (helpful for amateurs with limited breath control) made it appealing to the average musician. Its popularity prompted the first publication in an alternate key. The poem was included in The Poetry Digest: Annual Anthology of Verse for 1939 (New York: The Poetry Digest, 1939). As most of the subsequent songs of this period are in this accessible style, the success of “Ecstasy” may have given her better insight into the type of song that might please the general public.

In his 1893 Harper’s Magazine article, Antonín Dvořák proposed that in order to create a truly American art form, composers should incorporate “plantation melodies” and minstrel show music. The article prompted Beach’s immediate Boston Herald rebuttal: the opposing idea that American composers should look to their own heritages for inspiration.²⁴ There is no evidence that they met personally during his 1892–95 stay in the United States, but she was clearly aware of his views and had thought deeply about them. Whether coincidental or not, it was around this time that Beach began inclusion of musical ideas reminiscent of traditional folk music of the British Isles, as evidenced by the stark contrast between her op. 12 (1887) and op. 43 (1899) settings of Robert Burns’ poems. The 1887 songs number among the long, rambling, piano-heavy songs of her youth. In stark contrast, with inclusion of dotted rhythms and “Scotch snaps,” the 1899 settings could be mistaken for folk songs. These songs appealed to the market: strophic with short, easily remembered melodies and simple accompaniments. The most popular of these, “Far Awa’!,” was later published in six arrangements for various groupings of singers and instruments between 1918 and 1936.

Following the 1899 Burns songs’ success, Beach employed the same formula for the highly successful “Shena Van,” op. 56, no. 4 (1904), a setting of William Black’s poem from his 1883 romance novel, Yolande. The melody’s pentatonic melisma contributes to the song’s folklike qualities, while a simple chordal accompaniment mimics a bagpipe with an open fifth drone. Similarities with Edvard Grieg’s “Solveig’s Song” suggest it might have been the model for “Shena Van.”

Among the handful of Beach’s most popular and enduring songs are the Three Browning Songs, op. 44 (1900), composed and dedicated to the Browning Society of Boston. Their high tessiture and manner in which vocal lines approach climactic high notes contribute to these being the most vocally demanding of her songs. “The Year’s at the Spring” and “Ah, Love, but a Day!” are the best known and most frequently performed of the three. In 1932, “Ah, Love, but a Day!” was reportedly the popular choice in a nationwide survey of the most standard American songs.²⁵

By far the most popular of her songs, “The Year’s at the Spring,” was a staple of recital repertoire throughout the first half of the twentieth century. She later recalled: “It was composed while travelling by train between New York and Boston. I did nothing whatever in a conscious way. I simply sat still in the train, thinking of Browning’s poem and allowing it and the rhythm of the wheels to take possession of me.”²⁶ She also recalled, “I had no writing materials with me, and so I went over and over it in my mind – learned my own composition by heart, so to speak, and as soon as I got to New York, wrote it down in twenty minutes. That, practically unchanged, was the song I gave them.”²⁷

Robert Browning’s son was intensely moved upon hearing it, saying it could hardly be called a “setting:” the music and words seemed to form one entity; that one could not imagine anything more perfectly “married” than her music to his father’s words.²⁸ Audiences’ enthusiastic responses to it (and a length of less than a minute) often prompted singers to repeat it several times. Interestingly, it holds the distinction of being the first song transmitted over the telephone.²⁹

Although published as no. 1 of op. 44, “The Year’s at the Spring” is most effective at the end of the group when all three songs are performed together as a set. Its exuberance and animated tempo create a dramatic contrast with the two other songs’ slower tempi, bringing the set to a jubilant end. This reordering (2, 3, 1) also preserves the intended harmonic progression.

Only in her first style period did Beach set French texts, with varying degrees of success. Of these seven, “Jeune fille et jeune fleur,” op. 1, no. 3, and “Chanson d’amour,” op. 21, no. 2, are more varied versions of the rambling, fast harmonic rhythm songs, as they contain occasional measures with slower harmonic rhythms supporting “melodies.” These melodies appear as opening statements of verses or as short refrains. The four most appealing French songs show influences of the café chantant style of Charles Gounod and Eva dell’Acqua: “Le Secret,” op. 14, no. 2 (1891); “Elle et moi,” op. 21, no. 3 (1893); “Canzonetta,” op. 48, no. 4 (1902); and “Je demande á l’Oiseau,” op. 51, no. 4 (1903). Melodies reflecting the texts’ inflection are absent in these songs, perhaps a result of her unfamiliarity with the language.

In contrast, the melodies of her eleven German songs are excellent examples of melodies mirroring their texts’ spoken inflections. Both lighthearted songs and those with long, flowing melodies are among their number. They show her awareness of the most recent German song compositions, especially those of Hugo Wolf and Richard Strauss. Her admiration for Strauss’ song “Ständchen” inspired her to compose a piano transcription in 1902. Around the same time, she produced the masterpiece, “Juni,” op. 51, no. 3. Given her recent preoccupation with Strauss’ song, one might expect to find similarities between their melodies (Examples 6.4 and 6.5).

Example 6.4 Richard Strauss, “Ständchen,” op. 17, no. 2, mm. 10–12.

Example 6.5 Beach, “Juni,” op. 51, no. 3, mm. 7–8.

The text’s sole topic of blooming spring flowers is perfectly expressed through the melding of melody and accompaniment, which become increasingly effusive throughout the piece, ending with a burst of joy. Overutilized in some songs to the extent of being a trademark, implementation of repeated triplets in “Juni” is the precise element needed to heighten the song’s intensity to its final chord.

Second Style Period (1914)

During most of her time in Europe from 1911 to 1914, a busy travel and performance schedule precluded time for composition. This lull was broken in 1914, her most prolific year of song composition. The ten songs composed in Munich in May–June (opuses 72–73 and 75–76) comprise her second style period.

In September 1911, Beach sailed to Europe intending to establish a reputation abroad as a performer, thus promoting the sale of her works there. Her traveling companion, dramatic soprano Marcella Craft (1874–1959), was beginning the third year of her five-year contract with Munich’s Bavarian Opera. Beach and Craft’s friendship began in 1898 while Craft was a voice student at the New England Conservatory. Craft sang for Beach, who was immediately enamored with her voice. After moving to Europe in 1900, Craft sang in several Italian and German opera houses before being hired in Munich. She introduced Beach’s songs to European audiences as early as 1903. Richard Strauss, the director of the Bayrische Staatsoper, often chose her to sing roles under his direction, including the title role in his Salome. Because Craft was well established in Munich, Beach chose it as her “home base” abroad. In addition to her own ties there, Beach benefited from Craft’s musical and social connections with prominent public and musical figures in Europe.

As in the United States, programs of her larger instrumental works often included songs. Those large works received critical acclaim in Germany, but such was not always the case with her songs. Several critics expressed bewilderment about the songs’ sentimentality in comparison with the high caliber of her works for larger forces. The 1914 songs show that she may have taken this criticism to heart. German audiences were accustomed to hearing vocal works by her European contemporaries, including Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, Gabriel Fauré, and Claude Debussy. Rather than striving to rival such masters’ work, she took another path. At last, she had freedom to develop her own musical aesthetic, unhindered by oversight, input, or advice from her husband and mother.³⁰ She left the complex Richard Wagner-influenced harmonies behind, resulting in simpler songs with leaner, less complex accompaniments. The four in German show influences of German folk songs.

After an extended trip to Italy for rest and relaxation in 1914, Beach returned to Munich, where she completed ten songs during the month of June, all published by G. Schirmer. Until this point, A. P. Schmidt had been her exclusive publisher for almost thirty years. Her exasperation with Schmidt’s inability to keep European music stores stocked with her music led her to sign a contract with G. Schirmer the following month to publish future works.

In contrast with most earlier songs, these songs (and the majority composed afterward) served practical purposes. They were composed for singer friends, crafted to meet their needs for specific occasions and to display their greatest strengths. The 1914 songs were for performances at San Diego’s 1915–16 Panama–California Exposition and for future tours. The eight songs of opuses 72–73 and 75 have simple melodies in limited ranges and uncomplicated accompaniments and are accessible to musicians of all levels. However, due to Schirmer’s lack of large-scale marketing and restrictions in the publishing industry brought about by World War I, the delightful 1914 songs never received the widespread popularity of some of her earlier songs published by Schmidt.

The first of the 1914 songs, “Ein altes Gebet,” op. 72, no. 1, shows similarities with Wolf’s “Auf ein altes Bild,” suggesting that it served as model. Parallels include structure, text, title, and use of a two-measure ostinato that introduces a mixture of major and minor modes, a device Beach used with increasing frequency for the rest of her career. The text’s sentiment was clearly significant to her, as it returned in her choices of poems for two songs composed decades later: the necessity of faith in and total reliance on God’s saving care.

Two folklike songs (op. 73) were composed for contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink to sing at the San Diego Exposition, where her performances drew crowds in the tens of thousands. Schumann-Heink was a mother of eight; Beach’s choice of German texts about familial topics complemented her public image of maternal devotion and domesticity.

A sense of playfulness and whimsy surfaces in the four op. 75 songs, commissioned by American mezzo-soprano Kitty Cheatham (1865–1946), known for her programs of folk music and children’s songs. She was an early proponent of the African American spiritual, introducing many to both American and European audiences. These songs’ medium, limited ranges, and straightforward accompaniments make them accessible to all musicians. These four short songs are perhaps Beach’s most charming, in particular “The Candy Lion” and “A Thanksgiving Fable.” Their unexpected punch lines always elicit giggles from the audience.

The final 1914 songs, “Separation” and “The Lotos Isles,” op. 76, deviate from the folklike style of the previous eight. “Separation,” composed for Marcella Craft, returned to the highly chromatic style of the less accessible early songs, with unpredictable vocal lines and thick accompaniments. Familiar repeated triplet chords make a final appearance, as after “Separation,” Beach moved forward musically, “separating” herself from this style of composition.

“The Lotos Isles” bears no resemblance to any earlier songs. Alfred Tennyson’s depiction of the drugged, floating, lethargic state induced by ingestion of lotos flowers provided a fitting musical canvas for her experimentation with impressionistic devices. She unified musical and poetic elements through a hypnotic melody, enveloped within a murmuring, dreamy accompaniment figure. A nebulous tonal center settles only at the end of the piece. Her inclusion of elements of the modern French style of Henri Duparc and Debussy marked a clear compositional pivot point (Example 6.6).

Example 6.6 “The Lotos Isles,” op. 76, no. 2, mm. 1–9.

Third Style Period (1916–1941)

Her pattern of (practically) nonstop travel for performances, talks, and other appearances (along with the occasional respite) begun in Europe showed no sign of subsiding after her 1914 return to the United States. If anything, her demanding schedule intensified in 1915, leaving her scant time to compose. Returning to songwriting in 1916, she picked up where she left off stylistically with “The Lotos Isles.” The definite break between the style for which she had become best known, and an increasingly more contemporary sound, defines a third style period (1916–41).³¹ Musical ideas in this period became more compact and accompaniments less flamboyant. Her songs maintained their characteristic chromaticism yet emerged increasingly from contemporary musical trends rather than from late Romantic roots. Such musical elements included vacillations between major and minor modes; use of modal and quasi-modal scales; nonfunctional, ambiguous harmonies and tonal centers; extensive use of major–minor sevenths, half, and fully diminished seventh chords, and jazz harmonies. Although not serial music, use of all twelve scale degrees as a source of dissonance (chromatic saturation) in the introduction to the song “Birth” (1929), as well as her use of a whole-tone scale in the opening measures of the melody of “A Message,” op. 93 (1922), demonstrates her openness to modernistic techniques. The majority of the thirty-two available songs from this period have memorable, singable melodies, underpinned by unexpected, chromatic harmonies reflecting the aforementioned elements. In more dissonant songs, ambiguous or restless tonal centers are clearly resolved in the final measures; usually ending with a cadence in a major mode. All are in English; all but two are settings of texts by contemporary authors.

For nineteen summers between 1921 and 1941, Beach composed (or made sketches for) almost all her compositions during summer months spent at the MacDowell Colony. Along with the Colony’s peaceful atmosphere, intellectually stimulating interaction with some of the United States’ most revered writers, artists, and composers precipitated a flood of creativity each year. New friendships with composers of the next generation led to reflection about modern trends in composition. Adrienne Fried Block notes that Beach’s initial experiments with dissonant, nontonal harmonies began the year of her first stay at the Colony.³²

Rather than on songwriting, her compositional efforts at the Colony focused on choral, keyboard, and chamber works, as well as her opera, Cabildo, resulting in an output of only thirty-nine songs in twenty-five years, slightly more than half the number composed in the thirty years of the first style period. Most of the thirty-one published songs were issued individually with separate opus numbers, rather than in groups. Manuscripts for three unpublished songs – “Mignonette,” “My Love came through the Fields,” and “A Light that overflows” – were not assigned opus numbers, nor are there copyright records for them.³³ The manuscript of “To One I Love,” op. 135 (1932), is in private hands.

Inclusion of songs on her many performances and programs for various organizations and musical clubs introduced them to a wide range of audiences in towns of all sizes throughout the United States. Older songs were paired with her most recent works on these programs, focusing on the latter. An increasing number of speaking and performing appearances in the 1930s, as well as live performances of her music on local and nationwide radio broadcasts, kept her in the public eye, prompting greater demand for her music. Sales of her newest works were thwarted by the outbreak of World War I, though, when paper and other shortages precluded their expeditious publication. These production difficulties persisted through the Depression, further exacerbated by World War II. After A. P. Schmidt’s death in 1921, his successor, Henry Austin, was often discouraging about possibilities of publishing her new songs, sometimes questioning their marketability. His excuses and reluctance to issue or reissue her songs contributed to her contracting with other publishers (including Schirmer, Church, and Presser). It is conceivable that Austin’s hesitancy to publish her most recent songs was due more to their inaccessibility to the average musician than to production problems. Despite his lack of interest in her most recent songs, he was eager to issue reprints of her most popular songs (all composed before 1905), also requesting they be arranged for various combinations of voices.

Until her death, Beach urged Austin persistently to publish her latest songs. As evidence of their merit, her letters frequently referenced successful performances of those in manuscript and their popularity with voice teachers. Always worded considerately, her letters reveal ever-increasing impatience. She was eager to have new songs copyrighted, lest they be plagiarized (a doubtful probability, given that those in question were of the “no perceptible melody” type).

Among the first pieces composed at the MacDowell Colony in 1921 was the dramatic song, “In the Twilight,” op. 85. Typical of many third style period songs, its accompanimental device is more impressionistic in character than in harmonic structure. In some ways, harmonies are reminiscent of the first style period songs: quick movement from an initial tonality to other tonal areas by use of dominant sevenths and fully diminished chords, with a melody evolving from those harmonies. The poem tells of a fisherman’s wife and child, watching a turbulent sea storm through a window at twilight, waiting for him to return from his day’s work. The wife fears for her husband’s fate. To enhance the text’s ominous feeling, Beach set the song in F-sharp minor, one of her “black” keys. As the natural inflection of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s masterfully chosen words create their own “text-painting,” the majority of the musical interpretation was achieved by manipulating the keyboard’s motif within the harmonic movement rather than through the vocal line. Expansion and contraction of this impressionistic pattern creates dramatic ebbs and flows, intensifying the text’s sense of urgency, anxiety, and impending doom.

The song’s ending is the most unusual in Beach’s vocal works, bearing a resemblance to the ending of Schubert’s “Erlkönig.” After building tension with tremolos for fourteen measures, a fermata precedes a German sixth chord, followed by an unaccompanied vocal line ending the song without the chord’s resolution to reflect the text’s final, unanswered question (Example 6.7).

Example 6.7 “In the Twilight,” op. 85, mm. 100–15.

“To me all music is sacred. … It is – and must be – a source of spiritual value. If it is not, it falls short of its function as music.”³⁴

At the 1926 New York City convention of the American Pen Women, Beach became acquainted with dramatic soprano Ruth Shaffner (1896–1981), soprano soloist at St. Bartholomew’s Church (“St. Bart’s”), then the largest Episcopal church in North America. Schaffner invited Beach to attend a service there the next day to hear the composer’s Magnificat. Highly impressed by both the choirs and organist/choirmaster David McKay Williams’s musicianship, she began regular attendance there when in New York. Both Shaffner and Williams became two of Beach’s closest friends. Shaffner became Beach’s most frequent collaborator, performing together hundreds of times throughout the United States.

Involvement with St. Bart’s music program precipitated a flurry of sacred choral works and solo songs. Sacred music appealed to her more than anything she had previously done and became her favorite type of work. In a 1943 interview, she stated, “I find myself … turning more steadily toward so-called ‘sacred’ music. … It has not been a deliberate choice, but what has seemed a natural growth and a path which has brought me great happiness.”³⁵ In a personal letter from a decade earlier, she had written, “There can be no greater experience than the act of entering into the great religious texts.”³⁶

A fortuitous incident on July 4, 1927, led to another of Beach’s most significant relationships. Mezzo-soprano Lillian Buxbaum’s (1884–1974) performance on a Boston radio station prompted Beach to telephone her that afternoon, to invite her to visit Centerville the next day. Buxbaum’s acceptance led to a familial relationship between the two. Beach later regarded Buxbaum as a surrogate daughter. The two spent many summers together at Cape Cod and performed numerous concerts in New England. Like Shaffner, Buxbaum was a church soloist, serving at First Parish Church, Watertown, Massachusetts. Friendships with Shaffner and Buxbaum prompted composition of several pieces for their use in church services. Their needs and requests for sacred solos were met by Beach’s increasing inspiration to compose them. To fit the rich timbres in these women’s mid- to low ranges, some of these songs have lower tessiture than most earlier songs.

Unique among her songs is “On a Hill.” Returning to the United States after a six-month trip to Europe in 1929, a chance shipboard encounter presented Beach with new musical material when a fellow passenger from Richmond, Virginia, shared a song “crooned to her by an old Mammy all through childhood.”³⁷ (It was assumed to be an African American spiritual, although this has not been authenticated.) Beach said she had never been so pleased by a folk song. She provided the song with a simple, chordal, bare-bones accompaniment, varied harmonically (as was her practice) for each of its three verses. This unobtrusive accompaniment allows the listeners’ ears to be drawn to the words and haunting, pentatonic melody. It was subtitled “Negro Lullaby” to set it apart from spirituals, which had recently inundated the market. Henry Austin of the Schmidt Company was discouraging about its sales potential, however, unless the prominent African American singer, Roland Hayes, would have interest in promoting it.³⁸

Representative of Beach’s later sacred solos are “I Sought the Lord,” op. 142 (1937), and “Though I Take the Wings of Morning,” op. 152 (1941), both composed at the MacDowell Colony and dedicated to Ruth Shaffner. They express the same sentiment as her earlier song “Ein altes Gebet”: God’s omniscience and omnipresence. These texts might well have brought her comfort as she faced the realities of aging and adjusting to giving up her performing career.

Composed following her 1940 heart attack, “Though I Take the Wings of Morning” is a setting of Robert Nelson Spencer’s Psalm 139 paraphrase, taken from his The Seer’s House.³⁹ The song shows influences of the African American spiritual, with chords vacillating between E minor and E major and use of alternating major and minor thirds in the melody. The accompaniment contains a rare example of vocal doubling. The final words of this, her final art song (and antepenultimate composition), are a poignant coincidence: “bid me then, be still.”

Which were Beach’s favorite songs? Those she frequently asked Austin to send to singers for specific performances provide clues. Almost all of the songs she requested after 1917 were composed early in her career. Several she repeatedly asked for had been long out of print. Songs selected for performances at retrospective concerts in honor of her seventy-fifth birthday in 1942 (all from the first style period) may indicate some favorites, those she felt were her most representative: “Ecstasy,” op. 19, no. 2; “Villanelle: Across the World,” op. 20; “My Star,” op. 26, no. 1; “The Wandering Knight,” op. 29, no. 2; “I send my heart up to Thee,” op. 44, no. 3; and “June [Juni],” op. 51, no. 3. Those most consistently found on concert programs and mentioned in her correspondence were “Ecstasy,” the Browning Songs, op. 44, and “Juni.”

Despite the popularity of her works during her lifetime, after she was no longer physically able to tour and concertize to promote them, regard for most of her compositions, particularly the larger ones, declined quickly. Even though her later songs show her efforts to include more contemporary musical elements, the majority of her most well-known songs (from the first style period) were in the late nineteenth-century idiom, then regarded as old-fashioned and of little musical value. The author of her Musical America obituary described her later songs as not particularly original, having lost some of the melodic interest of her earlier works; certainly not an accurate assessment.⁴⁰ Restrictions in the publishing industry during World War II made reissuing out-of-print works difficult, leading to their quick neglect. By 1941, thirty-seven songs were unavailable. After Beach’s death, Shaffner made efforts to keep New York music stores stocked with songs that were still in print. This number had dwindled to two by 1984.⁴¹

“There is enjoyment in every contact with beautiful song – in writing, singing, playing, or even thinking of it – and it brings to the listener a sense of discovery of a world in which serenity and contentment still reign.”⁴²

New generations of musicians and audiences are becoming familiar with Beach’s songs as copyright expirations have made possible their inclusion in anthologies and their availability on the internet. They make a welcome re-addition to the body of American art song repertoire, as among their number one finds something for everyone: musicians of all levels of ability as well as audiences of varying levels of sophistication.

A quotation from the final published interview of Beach’s life demonstrates her optimism in the face of the physical decline of old age and the tragedy of World War II. Fittingly, she expressed her optimism with the metaphor of singing:

Representative Songs and Difficulty Levels

If relatively modest in quantity, the chamber music of Amy Beach comprised a significant body of work that confronted meaningfully the churning countercurrents animating her idiosyncratic musical style. She was a largely autodidactic composer steeped in traditions of European art music who nevertheless found ways to acknowledge her own American identity. She was a highly successful song composer who essayed the larger forms, and not at all timidly. She was a musician who, along with many of her contemporaries, lamented the relevance of Romanticism receding from the onslaught of twentieth-century modernisms. And she was a composer who, though “one of the boys,”² owing to her association with the Second New England School, worked energetically to promote the careers of other American women composers, even as she continued to publish her own music under the authorship of Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.

This last point bears emphasis, especially in approaching her chamber works. At the turn to the new century, the genre was still largely a male-dominated domain; relatively few women found their comfort zone while expending their aesthetic creativity on string quartets, piano trios, and all the rest. One has only to recall the experience of another gifted song composer, Fanny Hensel, who produced her sole string quartet in 1834 for private consumption, only to admit that, unlike her brother, who had already published two quartets, she had been unable to work through the unfathomable late quartets of Beethoven, and that in her view her larger compositions all too often died in their youth from decrepitude.³

Between Hensel and Beach, not many women composers invested substantially in chamber music. Among the few who come to mind was Clara Schumann, whose own Piano Trio in G minor, op. 17, dates from 1846, the year before Hensel died; following it by several years were the three Romances for violin and piano, op. 22, written for Joseph Joachim and figuring frequently in their concerts together.⁴ The list of women after Clara Schumann who entered the lists of chamber music is not long. Three French composers who did were Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944), with a pair of piano trios; Marie Jaëll (1846–1925), with an estimable string quartet of 1875; and Louise Farrenc (1804–75), whose extensive chamber compositions range, most unusually, from duos all the way to a nonet. The Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreño (1853–1917), to whom Beach dedicated her Piano Concerto and Violin Sonata, wrote a string quartet in 1896. English Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), who studied in Leipzig, where she met Brahms, created two sonatas in 1880, both in A minor, for violin, op. 5, and for cello, op. 7, and both were fairly enveloped by the “Brahmsian fog.”⁵ Smyth’s countrywoman Alice Mary Smith (1839–84) tested her mettle in piano quartets and string quartets. Finally, Swedish organist Elfrida Andrée (1841–1929) produced a violin sonata and a piano trio, quartet, and quintet, as well as string quartets.

Unlike most of the contributions of these predecessors, several of Beach’s chamber works did receive noteworthy performances during her career in the United States and abroad, especially the Romance, op. 23; Violin Sonata, op. 34; and Piano Quintet, op. 67. Nearly all of Beach’s chamber music appeared in print from her principal publisher, Arthur P. Schmidt, centered in Boston, with a branch in New York and international affiliation in Leipzig; only a few compositions were left in her musical estate for posthumous publication.⁶ Chronologically, this repertoire falls into three groups, of which the first concentrated on works for violin and piano: the Romance, op. 23 (1893); Violin Sonata, op. 34 (1896); Three Pieces, op. 40 (1898); and Invocation, op. 55 (1904). In the second group, Beach explored a variety of other ensembles: Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor, op. 67 (1909); Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, op. 80 (1920); Suite for Two Pianos, op. 70/104 (1924); and the one-movement Quartet for Strings, op. 89 (1929). The third and final group added two late works, the Piano Trio, op. 150 (1939), and Pastorale for wind quintet, op. 151 (1942).⁷

I

On May 1, 1893, having delivered a short address celebrating “the growth and progress of human endeavor in the direction of a higher civilization,” President Grover Cleveland pressed a golden telegrapher’s key to complete an electric circuit and activate 100,000 incandescent lights, launching the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Among the technological innovations that enlightened, amused, and titillated fairgoers over the next six months – no fewer than some 28,000,000 visitors, a staggering two-fifths of the population of the United States – was the world’s first Ferris Wheel (meant to rival the Eiffel Tower that had dominated the Parisian cityscape during the Exposition universelle of 1889), a moving sidewalk, the elevator, the phonograph, and the telephone. Among the practical inventions making their debut were the zipper and the dishwasher, the latter the brainchild of Josephine Cochrane.

She was just one of many women who made an impact at the fair. The Board of Lady Managers, whose president was Bertha Honoré Palmer, a wealthy Chicago socialite, had commissioned the Woman’s Building, designed by the twenty-one-year-old architect Sophia Hayden, to showcase the “progress” of womankind. A number of women artists and sculptors displayed their work, among them Mary Cassatt, who, against the discouragement of her fellow impressionist Edgar Degas, contributed a 58 × 12-foot mural on the theme of the modern woman⁸; and the sculptor Enid Yandell, a pupil of Rodin, who created the caryatid that supported the roof garden. Amy Beach received a commission to compose a cantata, the Festival Jubilate, op. 17, performed by an orchestra and chorus directed by Theodore Thomas on the opening day before an audience of some 2,000 that thronged the Woman’s Building.⁹ Early in July, Beach returned to the Exposition to perform some of her piano pieces, the song “Sweetheart, Sigh No More” (the third of the Four Songs, op. 14), and the Romance in A major, op. 23, the last with Maud Powell, the first American violinist to enjoy an international concertizing and recording career.¹⁰

As Adrienne Block has suggested, the inspiration for Beach’s first chamber work was, in fact, “Sweetheart, Sigh No More,” though likely few at the time realized the connection.¹¹ Set to a text by Thomas Bailey Aldrich,¹² editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1881 to 1890, this modified-strophic, sentimental love song falls into three sections (A, A’, A”) that progressively recall and expand to a climax the refrain-like line, “Sweetheart, Sigh No More,” which concludes each of the three five-line stanzas. Here is the first stanza of Aldrich’s poem and, for comparison, the beginnings of Beach’s song and Romance (Examples 7.1 and 7.2).

Example 7.1 Beach, “Sweetheart, Sigh No More,” op. 14, no. 3, mm. 1–6.

Example 7.2 Beach, Romance, op. 23, mm. bars 1–6.

Without much difficulty, one can perceive similarities between the two settings: they share, for instance, a rising melodic line defined rhythmically as three-eighths, dotted quarter, and eighth. That said, though, the Romance impresses as a recast version of the song. While the vocal line commences on its tonic keynote (f’) and progresses through scale degrees 2, 3, and 5 (g’, a’, c”), the violin melody begins on its fifth scale degree (e’) and climbs through scale degrees 6 and 7 (f♯’, g♯’) before reaching, via an appoggiatura on b’, 8 (a’). What is more, the instrumental melody unfolds in three consecutively expanding gestures that span, in turn, a fifth (e’–b’), sixth (f♯’–d”), and seventh (a’–g♯”), presaging Beach’s later manipulation and expansion of register in the concluding section of the piece, in which the violin plays its melody beneath the piano, which offers a murmuring accompaniment high above with pianissimo tremolos.

Like the song, Romance falls formally in three parts, though the second (animato) is sufficiently modulatory and developmental in character to suggest a contrasting middle section, yielding a ternary form (ABA’) for the whole, as opposed to the essentially strophic patterning of the original song. In the B section of the instrumental reworking, Beach explores third relationships, in particular the lower thirds F major and F-sharp major, more extensively than in the song, where the tonic F major is only briefly juxtaposed with D-flat and A-flat major, that is, thirds below and above the tonic. More subtle to trace is the relationship between the violin part and the vocal part. Initially, Aldrich’s poetry does map conveniently onto the Romance so that, for instance, we may readily underlay “It was with doubt and trembling” beneath the violin entrance, encouraging us in effect to hear op. 23 as a Lied ohne Worte. But within a few bars, any imagined vestiges of a text disappear, while the music asserts its autonomous character as an abstract piece for violin and piano.

With the Violin Sonata, op. 34, Beach produced a major chamber work that freely acknowledged its nineteenth-century European roots – first and foremost, Brahms; to a lesser extent Liszt, in Beach’s use of thematic transformation and certain piano figurations; Wagner, in her application of chromatically saturated textures, especially in the slow movement; and perhaps also Dvořák, in her intimations of folk music in the second-movement scherzo. The sonata dates from 1896, just months before the passing of Brahms in April 1897. From the outset, Beach’s score absorbs the modally infused late style of Brahms; indeed, not insignificant portions of her sonata seem to privilege modal versus tonal formations and relationships. If we consider, for instance, just the keys of the four movements – A minor, G major, E minor, and A minor (ultimately ending in the parallel major) – we see that the lowered seventh degree, a characteristic marker of the Aeolian mode, is tonicized in the second movement. In addition, several themes of the sonata tend to avoid the raised in favor of the lowered seventh scale degree and also feature the Phrygian half-step E–F, that is, in terms of the Aeolian mode, the fifth scale degree supported by its upper neighbor. As in the late music of Brahms,¹³ these modal flavors afforded Beach viable alternatives to the well-trodden terrains of late nineteenth-century tonality, increasingly perceived, as the century’s end neared, as having been stretched to its limits.

A case in point is the opening theme of the first movement, presented in stark pianissimo octaves, which analyze more convincingly as a modal rather than tonal gambit (Examples 7.3a and 7.3b). As the reduction in Example 7.3b illustrates, this theme divides the octave into the fifth and fourth (a–e’–a’), with the fifth scale degree embellished by its diatonic neighbor notes, d’ and f’.

Example 7.3a Beach, Violin Sonata in A minor, op. 34/I, mm. bars 1–7.

Example 7.3b Reduction.

Significantly, Beach initially avoids the seventh scale degree; its first appearance occurs in bars 5 and 6, as the (lowered) g♮’, an inner voice of the mediant C-major harmony. All these calculations have the effect of postponing until bar 14 the first, brief arrival of the dominant with its raised leading tone, G♯. But the onset of the Animato in bar 33, marking the transition to the second theme, now accommodates more compellingly a hybrid modal/tonal, if not tonal reading. Thus, the lowered seventh degree does return as a bass pedal point, but in tonal terms, as V/III, seemingly in order to prepare for a second theme in the mediant C major. Beach sidesteps this anticipated progression, however, so that when, moments later, the second theme emerges, it does so in a luminous E major, moving us securely into a tonal orbit around the dominant (Example 7.4).

Example 7.4 Beach, Violin Sonata in A minor, op. 34/I, mm. 63–71.

The first movement offers other instances of modal/tonal exchanges, as at the end of the exposition, where the expected close in E major yields instead to a modally tinged E minor. Similarly, in the recapitulation Beach obviates the effect of the returning second theme in A major by recalling at the end of the movement its Aeolian opening, as if to remind us of the crepuscular, modal origins of the sonata. These modal/tonal ambiguities inform, too, the late music of Brahms, likely a primary influence on Beach’s op. 34. One need look no further than the start of Brahms’ Violin Sonata in D minor, op. 108 (1888), where our sense of “D minor” arguably rather suggests transposed Aeolian on D, with its lowered leading tone, C♮. Or, the beginning of the Clarinet Sonata in F minor, op. 120, no. 1 (1894), where the theme describes a descending form of the Phrygian mode transposed to F. Or, to choose three of Brahms’ later compositions in A minor: the Intermezzo, op. 76, no. 4 (1878), Double Concerto, op. 102 (1887), and Clarinet Trio, op. 114 (1891), all of which highlight the lowered G♮ and thereby invoke the Aeolian mode.

As mentioned earlier, the second movement, in a ternary ABA’ scheme, offers a scherzo in G major (with a trio in the parallel minor), thus elevating the natural seventh scale degree to prominence, but now in a tonal context. The scherzo does not exactly begin in G major, however. Rather, the first two bars describe a falling figure that outlines an A-minor triad in imitative counterpoint before pivoting toward G major (Example 7.5).

Example 7.5 Beach, Violin Sonata in A minor, op. 34/II, mm. 1–5.

With the key signature of one sharp, this A-minor opening actually seems to draw on the transposed Dorian mode on A (i.e., A, B, C, D, E, F♯, G, A), which, through a simple process of rotation, readily transforms itself into G major, beginning in bar 3, where the bass of the piano establishes G as the tonal foundation. Beach’s conceit thus links the scherzo to the first movement, so that its close in the Aeolian mode gives way, if only momentarily, to transposed A-Dorian before turning to a tonal organization and confirming G major as the key of the scherzo. Here the F♯, which replaces the F♮ of the first movement, is a critical pitch that plays two roles – first as the raised sixth of A to impart a Dorian character, and then as the leading tone to G major. In a similar way the spectral trio, putatively in the parallel G minor, creates enough tonal uncertainty through its use of the lowered seventh degree to tempt us to hear parts of it as G-Aeolian, or at least as a tonal/modal hybrid (Example 7.6).

Example 7.6 Beach, Violin Sonata in A minor, op. 34/II, Più lento, mm. 1–3.

These evocative mixtures are not dissimilar to what Chopin had explored in his Nocturne in G minor, op. 15, no. 3, of 1833, which similarly resists fitting comfortably within its assumed key, owing again to the prominence of the lowered seventh degree and strategic placement of chromatic pitches that challenge the tonal identity of the piece.

Chromaticism weighs heavily on the third movement (Largo con dolore) of Beach’s sonata, one of her most heartfelt creations and the emotional high point of the work. Granted, the movement begins securely enough in E minor, but as we proceed further, the dense chromaticism more and more loosens the tonal moorings of the music, effectively setting us adrift in Wagnerian currents that evade tonal closure by means of strategically placed deceptive cadences. Example 7.7 illustrates one such cadence that seems intended to revisit the shifting tonal tides of Tristan und Isolde.

Example 7.7 Beach, Violin Sonata in A minor, op. 34/III, mm. 14–15.

And yet, by the end of the Largo Beach again betrays her affinity to Brahms. The surprise turn to E major in the closing bars allows the composer to revive some modal associations that bring to mind the Andante moderato of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, op. 98 (1886), celebrated for its initial horn solo in the Phrygian mode, brought back in its closing bars, as shown in Example 7.8a.

Example 7.8a Brahms, Symphony No. 4, op. 98/IV, mm. 113–18.

Five bars from the end of her movement, Beach appears to allude in the high violin tessitura to this horn call, featuring the lowered sixth and leading tone (C and D) as the piano climbs in gently quivering tremolos grounded in E major (Example 7.8b).

Example 7.8b Beach, Violin Sonata in A minor, op. 34/III, last six measures.

From this fading welter of sound we may extract a mixed mode on E (E–F♯–G♯–A–B–C–D–E), in which the first tetrachord supports E major, while the second favors a Phrygian hearing. As in Brahms’ symphony, modal mixtures thus help to create a spellbinding, iridescent conclusion that plays at the borders between tonality and modality.

Just as Beach found a way to link the scherzo to the first movement, so too does she connect the finale to the slow movement, in this case through an energetic transition. Its purpose is to redefine the placid E-major close of the Largo as the invigorated dominant-seventh of A minor (V–V7–i). Here Beach draws on precedents of several nineteenth-century composers. One thinks, for instance, of the finale of Mendelssohn’s Cello Sonata in D major, op. 58 (1843), or the complex finale of Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34 (1865), both of which use transitions to introduce their final movements. When Beach’s first theme arrives thirteen bars into the finale, we encounter a tonal/modal mixture that again may be read alternately in A minor or the Aeolian mode (Example 7.9).

Example 7.9 Beach, Violin Sonata in A minor, op. 34/IV, mm. 13–16.

Appropriately enough, this theme impresses as derived from the Aeolian theme of the first movement (cf. Example 7.3a), which partitions the octave into the fifth and fourth, the difference between the two themes being that in the finale, Beach partially fills in the fifth with a stepwise ascent to the third scale degree (A, B, C, E). Note also that the ornamentation of the fifth degree, E, with its upper neighbor, F, is now transferred to the busy tremolos of the piano accompaniment. Throughout the course of the finale, Beach’s primary theme undergoes metamorphoses not unlike the thematic transformations conjured by Liszt or what Arnold Schoenberg would later describe as the developing variations of Brahms. Thus, we may comprehend the lyrical second theme (Example 7.10) as a distant cousin of the opening theme – here Beach expands the original outline of a step and third (A B A C) slightly to accommodate a fourth (D E D G).

Example 7.10 Beach, Violin Sonata in A minor, op. 34/IV, mm. 47–51.

A more straightforward transformation of the first theme occurs in the fugato marking the beginning of the development (Example 7.11). In this case, Beach was perhaps recalling a similar procedure applied by Liszt in the fugato of his Piano Sonata (1853), the subject of which openly derives from the introductory bars of that work. But for the American theorist/pedagogue Percy Goetschius, in the main Beach followed “the methods of development peculiar to Brahms.”¹⁴ Was Goetschius referring to how she developed her themes, how she applied modal mixtures, or perhaps to other techniques? He did not elaborate further, though as we shall see, Beach would find other opportunities to indulge her Brahmsian pursuits.

Example 7.11 Beach, Violin Sonata in A minor, op. 34/IV, mm. 97–102.

Her next two chamber compositions, the Three Pieces, op. 40 (1898), and Invocation, op. 55 (1904), are both small-scale creations that return us to the songlike character piece represented by the earlier Romance. Precious little is known about their inspiration or early history. Of the three titles for op. 40 – La Captive, Berceuse, and Mazurka – Nos. 2 and 3 refer to well-established genres through several common markers, whether the muted, rocking rhythms and stable pedal points of the berceuse, or the rustic gestures and drones of the Polish peasant folk dance. But in the cases of La Captive and Invocation, the sources for the titles remain unclear, so we are left to our own devices to interpret them. La Captive, at least, does encourage some speculation. It may be that here Beach was alluding to Victor Hugo’s poem of the same name from Les Orientales (1829), a collection, in Graham Robb’s pithy summary, “set in a Never-Never Land which resembled Spain, Algeria, Turkey, Greece and China, and called itself ‘The East’.”¹⁵ Beach responded by restraining the violin part throughout to the G-string of the instrument, “freeing” this captive only in the final bars through an arpeggiated series of ethereal, ascending harmonics.

II

In 1908, when Beach turned to the vaunted genre of the piano quintet, she would have been intimately familiar with the exemplars of Robert Schumann (1842) and Brahms (1864), both of which she performed with the Kneisel Quartet, and probably also those of Franck (1879) and Dvořák (1887). All of these save the Dvořák use prominent cyclical thematic techniques, whereby material from the first movement reemerges in transformed guises in the finale (Schumann and Brahms) or second and third movements (Franck). Beach followed suit by recalling the mysterious prefatory Adagio of her quintet late in the finale, just before the coda, and spirited Presto leading to the radiant ending in F-sharp major. But in this case the construction of her Adagio, which unfolds a descending chromatic tetrachord (F♯, F♮, E, D♯, D♮, C♯), betrays the strong influence of Brahms’ quintet, with which we may hear Beach’s score to be in dialogue.

Beach would have noticed, for instance, that the initial bars of Brahms’ op. 34 describe a tetrachordal Dorian descent from F through E♭, D♮, and C (Example 7.12a), and that subsequently the same perfect fourth is filled out chromatically (F–E♮–E♭–D♮–D♭, and C; Example 7.12b), a centuries-old topical reference to the lament (passus duriusculus).

Example 7.12a Brahms, Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34/I, mm. 1–4, and reduction.

Example 7.12b Brahms, Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34/I, mm. 12–16, and reduction.

This motive of the composed-out fourth provided Brahms with several options for later use in his quintet – for instance, the half-step D♭–C, highlighted especially in the jarring Phrygian cadence at the end of the scherzo. Of particular relevance to Beach, though, was the second theme of his finale, also derived from the chromatic tetrachord, and the apparent inspiration for the first page of her quintet (Example 7.13).

Example 7.13a Brahms, Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34/IV, mm. 252–60.

Example 7.13b Beach, Piano Quintet in F♯ minor, op. 67/I, mm. 1–24.

In a remarkable transformation, Beach reworked this tetrachord, now transposed up a step to span the fourth F♯–C♯, into a new, tonally destabilized form. The reduction in Example 7.14 shows how.

Example 7.14 Reduction of Example 7.13b.

She begins by assigning the violins and viola a stationary, high pianissimo unison F♯ that seems to emerge ex nihilo, as if to assert that in the beginning was the unmediated, uninterpreted pitch F♯. Against it the piano erupts from below with a series of arpeggiated dissonances – first a French augmented-sixth chord, then a IV7 chord, and finally an embellished augmented triad, none of which clarifies our sense of F-sharp minor. The strings then repeat their unison, unharmonized pedal point and commence a craggy chromatic descent clearly modeled on the theme from Brahms’ finale (cf. Example 7.13a). This descent actually overshoots its goal, for it extends the tetrachord by one step to fill out the tritone F♯–B♯. From this point, the downward stepwise motion continues in unison with the natural diatonic version of F-sharp minor before ultimately coming to rest on the dominant. The half cadence on C-sharp major is, notably, the only consonant moment in the slow introduction. In short, Beach has thwarted our sense of a tonic so that instead of an F♯-minor triad we hear just the pitch F♯, isolated and suspended in a high, rootless register, where it blends with the swirling dissonant arpeggiations accumulating below. From a tonal perspective, the effect of the whole Adagio is thus to begin in medias res, setting us down in an unpredictable sea of chromatic sonorities from which we slowly drift toward the relative stability of the dominant.

Notwithstanding her clear debt to Brahms, the abstract model behind Beach’s Adagio is ultimately that of the historical slow introduction, traditionally understood to begin (securely) in the tonic and then to modulate and pause on the dominant, not infrequently via a stepwise descent, whether diatonic or chromatic.¹⁶ By literally upending a stable opening on the tonic, Beach acknowledges the critical juncture at which tonality had arrived. Indeed, it is more than fitting that her quintet was exactly contemporary with another chamber work in F-sharp minor, the Second String Quartet, op. 10, of Arnold Schoenberg, which, ironically, did begin with a stable F♯-minor triad, though, of course, it would end with a phantasmagoric vision of Stefan George’s poem “Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten” (“I feel a fragrance from another planet”), the new “pantonal” world that Schoenberg would fearlessly explore the very next year in his Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11.

Of course, Beach never committed to that salto mortale, though her modification of Brahms’ tetrachord afforded her a viable way to explore a fully saturated chromaticism that, in turn, had direct implications for her understanding of tonal relationships. And so, the first theme of the exposition uses a variant of the tetrachordal figure in the first violin, with the tonic pitch now transposed to the deep bass of the piano, as if to grant it structural weight, even though Beach fills the space between with rustling, mostly dissonant piano sextuplets, few of which actually touch on the tonic harmony (Example 7.15).

Example 7.15 Beach, Piano Quintet in F♯ minor, op. 67/I, mm. 25–28.

Eventually this first thematic group evaporates into diminished-seventh chords in the high register, and we proceed to the second theme, which, surprisingly enough, materializes in B major, that is, the subdominant (Example 7.16).

Example 7.16 Beach, Piano Quintet in F♯ minor, op. 67/I, mm. 73–79.

The new theme appears in the middle register of the piano in a texture reminiscent of Brahms’ nostalgic use of the so-called three-hand technique.¹⁷ Above we hear repeated statements of f♯’’’, the tonic pitch from the slow introduction that Beach now recasts as the fifth scale degree of the subdominant. She does not linger long before leading her new theme through a series of quick modulations that include the submediant D major, so that for a moment we might understand B major and D major as forming a pair of third-related tonalities. Nevertheless, the exposition does conclude in the subdominant, with references to the fourth B–F♯, and, again, the high treble f♯’’’.

Now if we pause to consider the tonal trajectory of the exposition, we begin to apprehend its overarching unity. By modulating to the subdominant, instead of, say, the mediant or dominant, Beach reinforces the tetrachordal foundations on which this music rests. That is, the Ur-tetrachord of the Adagio, F♯–C♯ (extended through B♯ to the tritone) is complemented and “completed” in the exposition by its mirror tetrachord, B–F♯ (Example 7.17).

Example 7.17 Beach, Piano Quintet in F♯ minor, op. 67/I, tetrachordal summary.

Taken together, the two symbolically span the total chromatic and help to explain the restless, searching quality of the quintet, which visits ever so briefly any number of keys while minimizing if not avoiding altogether unambiguous statements of the tonic triad until the final cadence of the movement. For Beach, tonality is still understood as a teleological process – F-sharp minor is the goal of this movement and is ultimately attained in its closing bars, though the narrative of how she accomplishes that is anything but predictable, as most of the expected or familiar tonal anchoring points in the movement are weakened or occluded, if not removed.

It is well known that at an early age Beach displayed not only perfect pitch but pronounced signs of synesthesia, through which she associated particular keys with colors.¹⁸ In her musical palette, F-sharp minor was a black key. In contrast, D-flat major, the key of the second movement of the quintet, aroused for her softer hues of violet. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, she created here a lushly romantic movement firmly centered on D♭, enharmonic equivalent of the C♯ of the first movement. The Adagio espressivo opens straightaway with a yearning theme in the muted strings, an eight-bar period that divides symmetrically into two four-bar phrases, the second stretched a bit by a brief metrical change from 4/4 to 6/4 (Example 7.18), as if to suggest an expressive rubato.

Example 7.18 Beach, Piano Quintet in F♯ minor, op. 67/II, mm. 1–8.

The theme appears subsequently in the piano, and then in the second violin a minor third above, in E major, before the cello introduces a second theme in B-flat minor, a minor third below the tonic. These third relationships return us to the realm of late Romantic tonality, as Beach rapturously redirects her gaze backward, to revive a fleeting, autumnal vision of the musical past from which she had first drawn her musical nourishment.

It remains then for the finale to reconvert the D♭ to C♯ in a brusque transition that launches the movement (Allegro agitato). The function of C-sharp major as the dominant is now in focus and reinforced, so that the movement ultimately can conclude in F sharp, not in the veiled, chromatically clouded minor of the first movement, but in its triumphant major form. Along the way, Beach introduces and develops themes that derive from the tetrachord of the first movement, including, toward the end of the development, a fugato with a tonal answer that chisels out the telltale fourth, F♯–C♯, all in preparation for a dramatic ascent and pause. From the silence emerges once again the Adagio of the first movement, with the high, disembodied F♯’’’ suspended above. The final unwinding of the tetrachord then transpires in the spirited coda, where we hear in succession seven dissonant chords that accompany the chromatic descent F♯, E♯, E♮, D♯, D♮, C♯, and C♮ (Example 7.19).

Example 7.19 Beach, Piano Quintet in F♯ minor, op. 67/III, mm. 311–14.

Its continuation, ultimately moving through B to A♯, provides the final steps that convincingly affirm the tonal paradigm of dominant-tonic and bring this rich work to its close. All that remains unanswered is which color in the end supplants the black and violet of the first two movements.

III

Among Beach’s least-known chamber work is the unjustly neglected Suite for Two Pianos (Founded upon Old Irish Melodies), released in 1924 as her op. 104. We do not know for certain, but a reasonable hypothesis is that the composition at least drew upon an earlier two-piano work titled Iverniana, which Beach had performed in 1910. She went as far as to assign the opus number 70 to that duet, but never published it; subsequently the manuscript disappeared, and no trace has yet emerged. What has come down to us as the Suite, op. 104, is in four movements, two of which have programmatic titles: Prelude (E minor), “Old-Time Peasant Dance” (E minor), “The Ancient Cabin” (A-flat major), and Finale (E minor/major). The predominance of the key of E minor, use of the lowered seventh scale degree and pentatonic formations, and appearance of Irish folk melodies or imitations thereof recall the composer’s “Gaelic” Symphony, premiered in Boston in 1896. In turn, that linkage encourages us to revisit briefly the celebrated controversy about American music precipitated by another symphony in E minor, Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, premiered in 1893 at the newly finished Carnegie Hall in New York.

In an interview appearing in the New York Herald on May 21, 1893, Dvořák had argued that the future of American music “must be founded upon what are called negro melodies.” The pentatonic slow movement of his symphony was understood to simulate African American spirituals, and in fact its haunting English-horn melody would later enjoy an afterlife as the spiritual “Goin’ Home.” Nevertheless, among the early reactions to the “New World” Symphony were these private comments of Beach, who found Dvořák’s music to “represent only the peaceful side of the negro character and life. Not for a moment does it suggest their sufferings, heartbreaks, slavery.”¹⁹ Dvořák later revised his views to take into account Native American music as a second repository of folk materials available to composers, and shortly before leaving the United States in 1895 to return to Prague went a step further: “It matters little whether the inspiration for the coming folk songs of America is derived from the negro melodies, the songs of the creoles, the red man’s chant, or the plaintive ditties of the homesick German or Norwegian. Undoubtedly, the germs for the best of music lie hidden among all the races that are commingled in this great country.”²⁰

Unlike Dvořák, whose symphony “hinted at an exotic otherness that listeners were supposed to intuit as American,”²¹ Beach confirmed her Gaelic/American sympathies by specifically labeling her symphony and citing several folk melodies excerpted from a series of articles about Irish music published in the Dublin-based Citizen of 1841.²² Of interest to us here is that when composing the Suite, op. 104, she returned to the same source and chose four additional Irish melodies for reuse, one for each movement. In order of appearance, they are: 1) “Song of Sleep” (Lullaby), 2) Irish dance, 3) “Molly St. George,” and 4) a traditional Irish fiddle tune.²³ Adapting them for her suite, Beach transposed three to different keys. The “Song of Sleep,” transmitted in a tonally ambiguous setting oscillating between C minor and E-flat major, she reworked to E minor/major, but left unchanged the Irish dance in E minor. Then, she transposed “Molly St. George” a fourth above from E-flat to A-flat major, and the tune for her finale a fifth above from A minor to E minor, ending in E major. Three of the four movements thus privileged E minor, the prevalent tonality of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony. In the case of the second movement (“Old-Time Peasant Dance”), Beach was perhaps intent upon providing an alternative to Dvořák’s irrepressible symphonic scherzo, thought by some scholars to have been his musical realization of a Native American dance described in Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha (1855). In effect, Beach shifted the locale from the southern shore of Lake Superior for Dvořák’s score to Gaelic “pagan mid-summer-nights’ feasts” for her own, during which “the mad priests and votaries of Baal danced …, whirling round their bonfires.”²⁴

Though Beach often drew upon traditional materials from the “Old World” to celebrate local color – witness, for example, the piano Variations on Balkan Themes, op. 60 (1904) – she also explored music of the Alaskan Inuit natives in her search for an exotic American “Other.”²⁵ Here Beach was allying herself with the so-called Indianist movement, which had produced visions of an “imaginary Native America steeped in an imaginary past”²⁶ in works such as Edward MacDowell’s orchestral Indian Suite, op. 48 (1892),²⁷ and in the lecture-recitals and publications of Arthur Farwell, who founded the Wa-Wan Press in 1901 in an effort to promote composers who incorporated Native American musical materials into their work.

An early example of Beach’s interest in the topic of Native American culture is her part song for female choir “An Indian Lullaby,” op. 57, no. 3, of 1895. In this case, neither the text, which speaks of a soft forest bed of pine needles, nor the music, which begins in a lilting, modally colored A minor but ends in the parallel major, actually appears to draw on authentic Native American materials. Rather, the composition reflects the gaze of Amy Beach as she searches for an idealized American exoticism while still employing primarily Western musical techniques (Example 7.20).

Example 7.20 Beach, “An Indian Lullaby,” op. 57, no. 3, mm. 1–4.

Be that as it may, in 1920 Beach returned to her part song and reused it as the basis for her Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, op. 80. Following the presentation of the part song by the string quartet, the flute enters with a brief cadenza that features augmented seconds, effectively identifying the instrument as the Native American protagonist (Example 7.21).

Example 7.21 Beach, Theme and Variations, op. 80, Variation 1, mm. 37–43.

In the first variation the flute projects a high cantilena, like a spontaneous improvisation suspended above, while the string quartet adheres below more closely to the theme. There then follow a contrapuntal second variation and a third in the style of a slow, morbid waltz, both markers of Western musical topics, neither of which, however, fully engages the spectator-like flute. Only in the fourth variation, a fleet-footed scherzo for the string quartet that shifts the key signature from A minor to F-sharp minor, does the flute begin to sing strains from the original theme above the string ensemble, all preparatory to the emotional crux of the composition – the exquisite, searing fifth variation in F-sharp major. Here the flute finally enters fully into the conversation of the quartet, as Beach resorts to her most passionate, chromatic, late-Romantic style, matched in intensity possibly only by some passages in her Piano Quintet (Example 7.22).

Example 7.22 Beach, Theme and Variations, op. 80, Variation 5, mm. 51–54.

But, as if turning back from this unusual symbolic alliance of two different musical worlds, she then leads us through a foreshortened reprise of the scherzo to the Tempo del Tema, with its relatively monochromatic theme in A minor and cadenza-like response from the flute. The ultimate sixth variation brings one more Western “artifice,” a fugue on a subject fashioned from a portion of the theme. Here the flute participates equally with the string quartet in dispatching a five-voice fugue, though its frenzied course toward A major is abruptly cut short. In the final page Beach comes full circle to the original modal theme and allows the flute to have the final comment with a hushed reference to its cadenza.

If the Theme and Variations offer an idealized meeting of two different musical cultures, a meeting admittedly still beholden to the Western musical hegemony, Beach progressed to the next step by directly integrating authentic Inuit melodies into a major chamber work, the one-movement String Quartet, finished in 1929.²⁸ This quartet was one of her few compositions she was unable to see through the press; indeed, not until 1994 did the first edition appear.²⁹ The result was a singular admixture of three modal Inuit melodies, each introduced against the backdrop of an intensely chromatic, dissonant language that also framed the composition in an introduction and coda best described, perhaps, as music in search of a tonal center. Ultimately Beach found it in the final cadence, in which an amorphous augmented triad slips almost imperceptibly into a G-major sonority, providing closure to this experimental work. The peripatetic fourteen-bar introduction, much of which returns in the coda, offers Beach at her most dissonant: these bookends represent her realization, as it were, of Schoenberg’s schwebende Tonalität, or “suspended tonality.” Here she explores a tonally decentered, weightless realm with eerie pianissimo altered chords – nearly all dissonant – and sliding chromatic lines that situate us somewhere in twentieth-century modernity and the crisis of tonality (Example 7.23).

Example 7.23 Beach, String Quartet, op. 89, mm. 1–14.

When, after a brief silence, the first Inuit melody appears in the viola, it enters initially as unadorned monophony, as if some vision of a preternatural, uncorrupted past unaffected by musical modernity, before then being swept up in the swirling chromatic polyphony of the ensemble. Beach’s strategy seems to be to contrapose the modern with the ancient – the European string quartet with its rich associations of contrapuntal thematic working out initially collides with the timeless, indigenous single-line music of the American Inuit. Thus, the third Inuit melody generates the subject of an unconventional fugue, the center of a symmetrical arch form (Introduction ABCB’A’ Coda) not unlike the paradigms employed by Bartók in his string quartets. And just as Bartók joins elements of folk music to a modernist style, so too does Beach create a new alliance of binary opposites – for instance, of modality vs. suspended tonality, or monophony vs. polyphony (Examples 7.24a and b).

Example 7.24a Beach, String Quartet, op. 89, mm. 15–19.

Example 7.24b Beach, String Quartet, op. 89, mm. 263–74.

But, in the end, the two sides meet halfway with a serene G-major sonority that at once resolves the accumulated dissonance of the whole and reimagines the limits of a modal musical universe, a compelling example of the new path Beach was beginning to explore in her later music.

IV

Beach would return to chamber music on two more occasions. The short Pastorale, op. 151, is a late recasting from 1941 for wind quintet of a modest earlier work for flute, piano, and cello. A far more substantial offering, one that conveniently summarizes the contrasting directions we have been tracing in her chamber music, is the Piano Trio in A minor, op. 150, composed in just two weeks in June 1938. In her diary Beach noted that she was creating the trio out of “old materials,” and indeed the result arguably represents her most eclectic creation, incorporating, in Adrienne Block’s estimation, “French modern, late Romantic, and folk elements, perhaps guided by narrative concerns.”³⁰

The first movement begins with swirling, ppp arpeggiations in the piano that project ambiguity in two ways. First, while the A-minor triad is embedded in the figurations, so too are the “outlier” pitches B, F, and D♯, creating a blurred, dissonant harmonic effect sometimes tending toward whole-tone formations, and indeed reminiscent of Beach’s impressionist piano character piece of 1922, “Morning Glories,” op. 97, no. 1. Second, the figure begins in the middle of a 3/4 bar, so that metrically speaking, we are not on terra firma until a bar and a half later, when the cello introduces the modal first theme on the downbeat in dotted halves (Example 7.25).

Example 7.25 Beach, Piano Trio, op. 150/I, mm. 1–6.

The more tranquil, expressive second theme follows in E-flat major (enharmonically D-sharp) and B major, two keys drawn from the anomalous pitches of bar 1 that again favor whole-tone associations, though on the local level Beach’s harmonic language continues to drift in the chromatically saturated tonal style associated with post-Wagnerian tonality.

Perhaps this retrospective quality explains her decision to base the outer sections of the slow movement (Lento espressivo) on her setting of Heinrich Heine’s “Allein,” op. 35, no. 2 (1897), an intense composition that looks back to the lofty subjectivities of German Romanticism, with treatments of the same, trenchant verses by Schubert (“Ihr Bild” from Schwanengesang, 1828), Clara Schumann (op. 13, no. 1, 1844), and the young Hugo Wolf (1878). Heine’s text concerns a portrait of a deceased lover who seems to come to life. Quite in opposition to Beach’s nostalgic return to the German Lied in the “black” key of F-sharp minor (Example 7.26a) is the central portion of the movement, a playful scherzo in the parallel major, inspired by an Inuit melody, The Returning Hunter (Example 7.26b), that Beach had first explored in her suite for children, Eskimos, op. 64, no. 2, from 1907:

Example 7.26a Beach, Piano Trio, op. 150/II, mm. 1–3.

Example 7.26b Beach, Piano Trio, op. 150/II, mm. 33–42.

Beach thus pairs an art song with a vernacular folk song in a combination of a slow movement and scherzo, an arrangement that recalls Brahms’ similar formal approach in the Violin Sonata No. 2 in A major, op. 100.³¹

Adrienne Block has surmised that the energetic finale was inspired by yet another Inuit melody, “Song of a Padlimio,” which Beach could have discovered in a monograph by anthropologist Franz Boas, The Central Eskimo (1888).³² Propelled by a compact ostinato figure spanning the thirds below and above A (A–G♯–F♯–G♯–A–B–C♯–B; note the reference to the F-sharp minor of the second movement), the movement features two themes, of which the first, in A major, appropriates pentatonic contours and syncopations pointing to folk song, while the second, in D-flat major, again lapses into Beach’s lyrical, romantic vein.

In the end, it seems, Beach was content to juxtapose and celebrate musical opposites and to suggest, but not insist upon, their interrelationship as she pursued her distinctive vision of American music. It was a dynamic vision of leavening practices drawn from familiar nineteenth-century European music with relatively little explored but fertile resources of an American musical Other. It was, finally, one vision of many for the establishment of a viable twentieth-century American style that would combine elements of high art and vernacular traditions – a vision, to be sure, “worthy of serious attention.”

One of the most remarkable dimensions of Amy Beach’s prolific career is that she composed so little orchestral music despite writing a string of pieces in rapid succession early in her career: Bal Masqué (1893), the “Gaelic” Symphony (1896), and the Piano Concerto (1900) – her only three major works for orchestra alone (see Table 8.1).¹ The symphony, in fact, prompted George Whitefield Chadwick, one of Boston’s leading composers at the time of its premiere, to welcome Beach as “one of the boys” for having written such a “fine work.”² Beyond this immediate praise, both the symphony and the concerto experienced a relatively high number of performances during Beach’s lifetime compared to many analogous pieces by her contemporaries. Why no second effort in either genre? Why no tone poems, or even short concert overtures?

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that while orchestral writing might have been prestigious, it was not profitable. In the 1890s, securing commissions from orchestras was typically a fool’s errand, as was seeking publication.³ Biographer Adrienne Fried Block has explained, however, that Beach was among a small coterie of American composers of her generation who benefited from the generosity of publisher Arthur P. Schmidt. Sympathetic to the difficulties they faced in the international arena, Schmidt subsidized their large orchestral scores (including Beach’s symphony) with receipts from music sold for home use.⁴ Beach’s relationship with Schmidt cooled after her husband’s death in 1910, but this change cannot fully explain why she might have turned her efforts away from the orchestra since her published music remained in demand.⁵

Beach also faced the substantial hurdle of widespread bias against women. Though not an absolute barrier to staging her works, gender figured prominently in their reception, including in Chadwick’s casual erasure when he called her “one of the boys.”⁶ In 1904, an astute critic named Berenice Thompson called out the obvious double standards Beach faced, noting,

And Thompson believed that Beach’s best years as an orchestral composer were yet to come. “Mrs. Beach’s talent finds its truest expression in large forms,” she argued, and was “a striking exception in an age given over to miniature work.” Urging Beach to persist against the negativity directed toward her gender, she added, “Her own instincts and predilections are those which will make for the most supreme accomplishments in her art. Her publisher, if he is a man of intelligence, will allow her genius full sway.”

Beach, of course, did not take Thompson’s advice and focused for the rest of her career on solo piano works, songs, and choral pieces – genres in high demand among women’s music clubs.⁸ On a practical level, she preferred to create in circles that appreciated her unconditionally without the constant barrage of sexism.⁹ After her husband’s death, moreover, she resumed touring as a concert pianist and often found herself too busy to compose in larger genres, once remarking that “I am too enthusiastic a traveler yet to settle down, too fond of my audiences to give them up.”¹⁰ But there is still more to the story than mere avoidance of a male-dominated orchestra culture and a restless spirit. Orchestras continued to perform Beach’s music well into the twentieth century, after all.

Aesthetics also appeared to play a key role in Beach’s move away from orchestral music. Thompson had encouraged Beach to continue subverting prevailing gendered attitudes that classed orchestral works as “masculine” and miniatures as “feminine.”¹¹ But Beach herself developed distinct artistic priorities in her works that overturned this binary altogether. At their core, all three orchestral pieces are explorations of song, suggesting that song itself held pride of place in Beach’s aesthetic outlook. By the 1890s, composers and critics had developed a wide-ranging discourse about the relationships between songs and instrumental music that informed Beach’s approach to all three pieces and, as I argue here, helps explain her orchestral music’s longevity as well as her lack of urgency in composing more. Viewing – and hearing – Beach’s orchestral works with songs’ centrality in mind ultimately offers a new framework for reassessing American orchestral music dating from her lifetime.

Song as Symbol

The incorporation of songs into instrumental music, whether through direct quotation or more subtle allusion, creates a rich (if slippery) symbolic matrix that offers listeners multiple layers for aesthetic and interpretive engagement.¹² While the practice has spanned at least two centuries, from Franz Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet (1819) to Philip Glass’ “Heroes” Symphony (1996), it reached an important crest during the 1890s in ongoing transatlantic discussions about the capacity of folk songs to suggest a national identity in instrumental works. Antonín Dvořák famously asserted in 1893, for example, that “the future music of [the United States] must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. … These are the folk songs of America, and your composers must turn to them.”¹³ Noting the ubiquity of the practice, he added, “All of the great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people.” Yet, references to preexisting songs in instrumental music did not always point in the direction of national identity. Even composers known for writing so-called absolute music, such as Johannes Brahms, used song-based allusions to generate symbolic depth.¹⁴ Indeed, referencing song in instrumental music was a pervasive stylistic strategy that heavily shaped the context in which Beach composed her orchestral works.

In the United States, the practice of referencing songs in instrumental works is nearly as old as the country itself. William Gibbons has shown that at least two generations of early American composers quoted “Yankee Doodle” for its “powerful symbolic value” – in this case, as a symbol of the nation.¹⁵ Among orchestral writers, both Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781–1861) and Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–69) used a variety of patriotic songs, including “Yankee Doodle,” for this very purpose.¹⁶ Other early symphonists, notably William Henry Fry (1813–64) and George Frederick Bristow (1825–98), referenced songs that facilitated the construction of picturesque narratives – the Christmas hymn “Adeste Fidelis” in Fry’s Santa Claus: Christmas Symphony (1853) and “Tallis’s Evening Hymn” in a movement of Bristow’s “Arcadian” Symphony (1872) meant to depict nighttime on the prairie.¹⁷ By the latter part of the century, then, finding orchestral inspiration in song was certainly not out of the ordinary.

The specific use of folk songs to construct an American national identity emerged at mid-century in the piano music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk and blossomed across genres over the next several decades. Brooklyn composer Ellsworth Phelps’s “Emancipation” Symphony (1880), for example, took inspiration from African-derived folk music but did not quote any songs directly.¹⁸ John Broekhoven’s Suite Creole, which premiered in Cincinnati in 1884, hewed more closely to Gottschalk’s style by quoting Creole songs directly.¹⁹ By 1893, when Dvořák made his famous argument that “negro melodies” would be the most suitable foundation for an American national style, such works had long been at the center of debates about the relationship between the folk and the national. Boston composer George E. Whiting’s remarks at the 1884 Music Teachers National Association meeting typified the terms of debate:

The intensity of these discussions would only grow through the 1890s as commentators, including Beach herself, debated which folk music repertoires should be considered representative of American national identity.²¹

While these debates would certainly prove important for Beach in time, their prominence often obscured a parallel discourse about the relative artistic value of song references, regardless of their source. Failing to acknowledge the symbolic potential of direct quotation, critics often argued that it was tantamount to plagiarism or else signaled a lack of melodic creativity. Writing in 1873, one reviewer of Bristow’s “Arcadian” Symphony called quotation “inartistic,” adding that “the poverty of resource indicated by the borrowing practice, even in minor works, is aggravated in the symphony.”²² Of course, certain composers agreed with this sentiment since it granted artistic superiority – and true individuality – to those with a boundless gift for melodic writing. Dvořák himself explained that when he engaged with folk music, he attempted to transcend direct quotation with suggestive allusion, thus forging a piece solely from inner creativity. “I study certain melodies until I become thoroughly imbued with their characteristics,” he said in an 1893 interview, “and am enabled to make a musical picture in keeping with and partaking of those characteristics.”²³

By the time Amy Beach sat down to write her first orchestral works in the 1890s, longstanding debates about the construction of national musical identity and the relative value of song references had converged in response to Dvořák’s 1893 pronouncements. But she, among others, recognized that while national identity was a pressing political issue, the notion that song could symbolize national identity presumed the artistic desirability of instrumental song references in the first place. Writing in 1941, music historian Eileen Jackson (whose married name would later be Eileen Southern) maintained the power of this desirability by dividing certain folk-inspired orchestral works into two analytical categories: “Musical Works Containing Themes from Negro Folksong” and “Musical Works in the Negro Idiom.”²⁴ More recent treatment of the same material has tended to elide the difference between “theme” and “idiom,” thus blurring the artistic significance of direct song references in orchestral repertoire from the era.²⁵

Song as Compositional Fundament

The deployment of song in an instrumental context presents distinct interpretive challenges for performers, listeners, and analysts. In some instances, the song’s text might offer a clue about its meaning as a musical symbol. In others, the very removal of the text might illuminate other expressive dimensions of the tune that recast, or even thwart, the text’s meanings. In others still, preexisting tunes might simply provide a source of creative inspiration irrespective of the text, with a motivic fragment serving as a point of departure for further musical elaboration and exploration. Among all three strategies, moreover, the song’s presence in the score might range from wholesale quotation to nearly complete fragmentation. Beach’s three orchestral works display virtually all the possible combinations at various moments, leading to a small but rich site for investigating how she might have perceived songs’ value in an instrumental context.

Given Beach’s expansive catalog of songs – nearly 150 – we can be reasonably certain that she held the genre in high esteem. It carried the potential to reach a large public through domestic and stage performances while offering composers distinct opportunities for honing their craft. “A small gem,” she once claimed, “may be just as brilliantly cut as one weighing many carats.”²⁶ Yet, vexingly, she left few direct clues about why song became such a fundamental element in her approach to large-scale instrumental works as well. Anna Poulin Alfeld has emphasized that Beach’s avoidance of public remarks about self-borrowings in the symphony and the concerto strongly suggests that she wanted listeners to evaluate these pieces on “purely musical and compositional terms.”²⁷ Nevertheless, other available evidence demonstrates that Beach approached the act of composition with certain methods that offer a fuller explanation of what these “purely musical and compositional terms” might have been.

In her later career, Beach’s visibility as a leading composer afforded her many public opportunities to share ideas about the act of composition. For example, in a 1918 piece for The Etude called “To the Girl Who Wants to Compose,” Beach divided the act into three distinct domains – the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual:

Twenty-five years later, again in The Etude, she described the ideal compositional process in much the same way:

Both formulations were conventional descriptions of the compositional process and in many respects echoed Joseph Haydn’s well-known explanation from over a century earlier. As Haydn put it, he extemporized at the keyboard, “according to whether my animus was sad or happy, serious or playful,” and then devoted his “entire effort toward elaborating and sustaining [a compelling idea] according to the rules of art.”³⁰ Like Beach, he moved from emotion to idea to elaboration as technical skill hammered unbridled feeling into a meaningful musical shape.

Yet the nuances of Beach’s first step – accessing an emotion – departed significantly from Haydn’s fanciful improvisations. In one published explanation, she argued that memories of long-past events could erupt from the unconscious, creating “not only an art-form, but a veritable autobiography.”³¹ This observation traded in nineteenth-century tropes about the role of life experience in musical creativity that would have been foreign to Haydn.³² In other commentary, she remarked that poetic texts often generated sufficient emotional sparks for composition. After procrastinating on a setting of a Robert Browning text, for example, she finally found inspiration while she “simply sat still on the train, thinking of Browning’s poem, and allowing it and the rhythm of the wheels to take possession of me.”³³ For Beach, ruminating on the emotional content of a song or text was a perfectly legitimate way to “get in the mood” for composing, even away from the keyboard.

Of course, a spark for composition and composition itself are two very different things – a sharp distinction that Beach understood all too well. On the advice of Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Wilhelm Gericke when Beach was a teenager, her parents dissuaded her from pursuing formal training in composition, leaving her to figure it out for herself.³⁴ Beach was a uniquely successful autodidact from a young age because she possessed the ability to assimilate large amounts of musical information on a single hearing and could retain it with a prodigious memory. After her marriage in 1885, when she was only eighteen, her husband Henry curtailed her emerging career as a concert pianist, essentially compelling her to pursue composition even more vigorously but still without formal instruction.³⁵ Looking back in 1943, she explained that to learn her craft, she would write out music from memory and then compare it to the score while occasionally making certain manipulations to challenge herself.³⁶ At the same time, she cautioned that careful study was not sufficient for writing an effective composition. Study has “nothing to do with ‘inspiration,’” she observed, “but provides the only means of enabling [a composer] to project ‘inspiration’ into the minds and hearts of listeners.” The emotional spark was fundamental, and she sought that spark in songs.

Song in Beach’s Orchestral Works

The pervasiveness of songs in Beach’s orchestral works suggests that they served as her “sparks.” Several previous scholars have tracked and analyzed the source material in this repertoire, and their collective findings are reproduced in Table 8.2 for easy reference. Drawing several strong inferences from this analysis, Adrienne Fried Block has viewed Beach’s engagement with songs in the symphony and the concerto through the lenses of national identity and autobiography, respectively, while giving the most interpretive weight to song texts from allusions in the concerto.³⁷ Sarah Gerk, Anna Poulin Alfeld, and E. Douglas Bomberger have challenged aspects of Block’s interpretations by marshaling new evidence to reinterpret Beach’s selection, structural placement, and compositional elaboration of material derived from song.³⁸ Despite the depth of these interpretations, the fundamental question, “Why song?” remains unaddressed. Zooming out from a detailed examination of the scores, my assessment here is that despite substantial differences between the three pieces on nearly every compositional level, the presence of song served as an intentional artistic binding agent that resonated with the public throughout Beach’s lifetime.

Bal Masqué

Bal Masqué, Beach’s first work for orchestra alone, was written as a prelude to a Boston revival of the musical theater piece The Black Crook, which had premiered in New York in 1866.³⁹ Beyond this utilitarian function, it was also an experiment in orchestration that formed a feedback loop in Beach’s autodidactic process. Part of this effort involved eliminating the variables of a text and choir that had shaped her approach to the Grand Mass in E-flat major, op. 5 (1890), and Festival Jubilate, op. 17 (1892). In both earlier works, the texts themselves offered a significant emotional spark, while European works from the standard choral repertoire served as occasional models or templates.⁴⁰ In contrast, writing for orchestra alone presented an open field for emotional content, and she ultimately chose a comic text, “Wouldn’t That Be Queer,” by Elsie Jones Cooley, as a key source of inspiration:⁴¹

If the trees knew how to run up and down the hill,

If cats and dogs could talk and we had to keep still,

If the flowers should all try

like birds to sing and fly,

And the birds were always found,

Growing up out of the ground,

Dear, dear, wouldn’t that be queer?

If the babies when they came were very old and tall,

And grew down instead of up to be quite young and small,

If the sun should come out bright

In the middle of the night,

And the dark should come and stay

When we knew that it was day,

Dear, dear, wouldn’t that be queer?

Published in 1894 as op. 26, no. 4, Beach’s waltz-like setting of this text, which rarely rises above a mezzo forte dynamic, is suitably whimsical, like a child whispering an imaginative secret. It is no surprise, then, that she could draw an emotional connection between the song and the socially topsy-turvy world of a nineteenth-century masked ball.⁴²

Although Bal Masqué and “Wouldn’t That Be Queer” share nearly identical melodies, Beach exploited the potential for smoother melodic shaping, more interesting counterpoint, and vivid coloration in her orchestral arrangement – variances that suggest she was attempting to draw more of the song’s emotional content from the orchestra than she felt was possible in the vocal setting (Example 8.1). Regarding these types of transformations, she once observed, “When one sees how it looks, it is quite possible that the melodic line may not seem at all suitable for the voice. Its appearance (not its character) may suggest the violincello – the combination of violin and harp – and lo! the original theme may develop into something quite different from the song that was first planned.”⁴³ In this case, the two versions display only subtle musical differences but share the same underlying emotional character despite the variance.

Example 8.1 Comparison of the opening melodies of Beach’s “Wouldn’t that be Queer,” op. 26, no. 4, and Bal Masqué.

Riding a wave of positive reviews of Beach’s large choral works, Bal Masqué was one of eight pieces programmed on the Manuscript Society of New York’s opening concert of the 1893–94 season. Critics had widely praised the Mass setting, particularly its orchestration and emotional alignment with the texts.⁴⁴ Unfortunately for Beach, however, they did not appreciate Bal Masqué – an unexpected misfire after the previous acclaim. William Thoms, for example, lamented that it “proved a disappointment to those familiar with the gifted Boston lady’s larger achievements in works of a more serious character, which have led us to expect higher things from her pen than the sketch presented.”⁴⁵ A writer for the Evening World said it “has a pretty theme” but dismissed it as “trivial.”⁴⁶ The general audience, on the other hand, loved the piece so much that it reportedly “set the saltatorial nerves of the young people right on edge.”⁴⁷

The fact that Beach declined to share the source of her emotional spark – Cooley’s text – can help explain the polarized reactions. With only the title and an unusual genre designation (“sketch”) to guide expectations, critics familiar with her earlier work might have assumed it would contain elements appropriate for a tone poem: a narrative, inner drama, thematic transformations, and other displays of musical elaboration. When the piece ultimately reminded them of a “Strauss waltz” – a common refrain – the piece’s “triviality” became a disappointment. Average listeners, on the other hand, took the title at face value and perceived the piece as Beach had intended it – as droll accompaniment to a masked ball, not a portrait of the ball itself. Hence dancing in their seats!

More broadly, the mixed responses to Bal Masqué show that a composer’s intent to convey specific inner emotions with music is not self-revelatory. Disclosing this intent often relies on certain expectations generated with clues beyond the notes of the score: an epigraph, a genre designation, or a sheet music cover (to name a few examples). Would sharing the source of her inspiration have prompted dissatisfied critics to hear the piece differently? Either way, the electric audience reaction to Bal Masqué proved to be useful market research for Beach and Arthur P. Schmidt, who published the underlying song and an arrangement for solo piano a few months later while quietly leaving the orchestral “sketch” behind – save for an 1895 Boston Pops show led by Antonio de Novellis where the program specifically directed antsy audiences to “preserve silence during the performance of this number.”

Piano Concerto

Of Beach’s orchestral works, the Piano Concerto contains the most – and the most oblique – references to preexisting songs. Each movement contains transformations of melodic material drawn from her own art songs published about a decade earlier, rather than the wholesale quotations found in previous works. An analysis of the art song texts led Adrienne Fried Block to an autobiographical reading of the concerto in the 1990s, but her interpretation would have been even more inscrutable to Beach’s original audiences at the work’s 1900 premiere than the quotations in the “Gaelic” Symphony proved to be in the 1890s. Douglas Bomberger has offered a more historicist reading that places the concerto in direct dialogue with Dvořák’s famous “New World” Symphony, which Beach had heard in Boston a few years earlier and had roundly critiqued in her private notebook.⁶³ Of course, like the “Gaelic” Symphony, the “New World” Symphony was itself inspired by song – folk song, to be more precise. Unlike Beach, Dvořák had attempted to evoke a folk idiom without direct reference to specific songs. Following Bomberger’s lead, then, we might hear the conversation between Dvořák’s symphony and Beach’s concerto as her attempt to test the boundaries of quotation and allusion, song and idiom – a distinction that would continue to inform American orchestral composition well into the twentieth century.

The crux of Bomberger’s revision of Block’s interpretation rests on how to hear the principal theme of the concerto’s first movement. Block presents the sinewy five-measure melody as an allusion to Beach’s 1885 setting of a Chateaubriand text, “Jeune fille et jeune fleur,” and notes the shared key, “serious affect,” and “falling modal scales” of both excerpts.⁶⁴ The reference is thin but is buttressed by the secondary theme’s more overt allusion to another passage in the song.⁶⁵ Bomberger draws a convincing parallel between the concerto theme’s melodic and rhythmic contours and those of the principal theme in the fourth movement of Dvořák’s symphony. He argues further that Beach’s manipulation of the theme later in the movement “improves” on the technical and emotional deficiencies she had noted in private comments about Dvořák. Considering all three melodies side by side – the song, the symphony, and the concerto – we might hear that the folklike character of each theme, conveyed by modality and an accompanying sense of timeless origins, serves as a clear expressive binding agent in keeping with the matrix of allusions shared across the pieces⁶⁶ (Example 8.2). In other words, rather than referencing folk songs directly, the theme’s allusions construct a folk idiom inspired by a chain of song encounters.

Example 8.2 Comparison of the principal themes of (1) Dvořák’s Symphony “From the New World,” movement IV; (2) the opening of Beach’s Piano Concerto, op. 45, movement I; and (3) Beach’s song, “Jeune fille et jeune fleur,” op. 1, no. 3.

The program note distributed at the concerto’s premiere, given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Wilhelm Gericke with Beach at the piano, offers a rather dry technical analysis of each movement’s form with no descriptions of the melodic character found in any of the work’s several main themes. Presumably written by Beach herself, the note not only obscured the sources of her melodic ideas but concealed the work’s abundant stylistic connections to Dvořák’s “New World” and other inspirational models, such as Brahms’ Second Concerto. While this framing presumably placed the concerto on an even technical playing field with similar pieces – an understandable desire for Beach, who would almost certainly have faced sexist accusations of plagiarism or derivativeness by disclosing her inspiration – the note’s utter decontextualization left significant holes for listeners to fill with their own impressions of where the piece “fit” in the contemporary musical landscape.

And fill they did. A writer for the Boston Transcript complained loudly that Beach had attempted to do too much at once. “In this concerto,” the critic observed,

[S]he has done pretty near everything that possibly can be done with pianoforte and orchestra; there is material – essential and ornamental – enough in it to make two concertos. It is overloaded with figural ornamentation and contrapuntal cleverness. To make some of her combinations effective and clear would take the skill of a Richard Strauss.⁶⁷

Of course, perhaps Beach tacitly took these remarks as proof that she had outdone Dvořák’s “machinery” in the “New World” Symphony! Yet the distinguished critic Philip Hale grumbled even more resolutely and left no room for a positive spin:

The concerto was a disappointment in every way. … The themes were not distinguished; the development was too often vague and rambling; the moods, when there were moods, were those of other composers; thus the mood of the opening of the slow movement was palpably Wagnerian. … There were notes, notes, notes; and where there were so many notes there were inevitably a few pretty passages; but there was little or no display of vital musical thought, proportion, skill in structure, or taste or brilliance in orchestral expression.⁶⁸

Notably, Hale detected something noteworthy about the opening theme – the theme under scrutiny here – but dismissed the modality and asymmetry of its folklike idiom as “Wagnerian,” a catchall epithet for any musical procedure that deviates from classical convention.⁶⁹

But not all the critics hurled boulders. Writing for the Courier, Howard Ticknor specifically praised Beach’s melodic gift and handling of melody as a structural unit. “Each year,” he noted, “sees a fresher, richer and more spontaneous melody, alike in the simple salon songs and in works for the chamber, or the orchestral musician, while the variety, surety and strength of the instrumentation develop logically and agreeably, as was felt when her ‘Scotch’ symphony was presented.”⁷⁰ Invoking symphony offered readers a small context for approaching repeat performances of the concerto, but Louis Elson pinpointed it with even greater precision in his review for the Daily Advertiser, worth quoting at length for its perceptiveness:

The whole first movement seemed rather indefinite at a first hearing; although there were many passages of much charm, there did not seem to be that coherency and clear scheme which one finds in the masterpieces; it was a case of the dove soaring with the eagles. … The largo, although given on the house-programme as combined with the finale, was in reality a movement of itself. It treated a figure which reminded of the fate-figure in Wagner’s trilogy (Cesar Franck has also developed this figure in his D minor symphony) and indicated a pensive melancholy. The finale seemed to us the best, most decisive and most original movement of the work. There were some phrases given in this that seemed to be in the vein of Dvorak’s “American Symphony,” although not suggesting plagiarism in the remotest degree. The entire movement was interesting and had many bold and striking contrasts.⁷¹

Although Elson made a connection between the concerto’s fourth movement and Dvořák’s symphony (rather than the first), his remarks indicated that a sensitive listener could ultimately detect Beach’s ongoing efforts to develop an orchestral idiom that partook of songlike features, whether art song, folk song, or even Wagnerian vocal lines. And the audience? Elson remarked, “The public were in the friendliest mood and recalled the composer-pianist four times and also added floral tributes.”

Beach’s Orchestral Afterlives

Louis Elson’s remarks about the concerto evidently left Philip Hale unmoved after a second hearing, but, more important, they opened the door to the possibility that Dvořák’s symphony had in fact launched a new branch of orchestral writing – a branch that Beach had followed in both the “Gaelic” Symphony and the Piano Concerto. Over the next half century and beyond, dozens of composers – Henry Gilbert, Nathaniel Dett, Daniel Gregory Mason, Frederick Delius, William Grant Still, and Aaron Copland, to name only a few – followed Dvořák’s lead by incorporating various folk song elements into their works. But while Dvořák had assiduously avoided direct quotation in favor of an idiomatic approach (save for a brief explicit allusion to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in the symphony’s first movement), many of these composers freely borrowed well-known melodic fragments and, in some cases, used entire songs as structural themes, much as Beach had in the “Gaelic” Symphony. These composers still risked accusations of plagiarism – William Dawson’s 1934 Negro Folk Symphony is a noteworthy example⁷² – but a critical mass of works with quotations signaled to audiences that the practice served a symbolic purpose beyond purely musical considerations. And this general relaxation rejuvenated Beach’s orchestral works, much to her benefit.

The reception of Beach’s orchestral music transformed dramatically after the turn of the century. Conductor Emil Paur, who had directed the “Gaelic” Symphony’s premiere in 1896, returned to the work in 1905 with the Pittsburgh Orchestra in a concert that also featured Beach at the piano in Saint-Saëns’ Second Concerto. Audiences and critics alike loved the performance. Charles Boyd of the Weekly Gazette remarked that “the themes are decidedly melodious and their development is logical and sensible.”⁷³ “Strange to say,” he added, “the four movements met with almost uniform approval, though one would predict a preference on first hearing to the second movement, with its naïve siciliana and dainty scherzo” – the movement with the most explicit allusion. Another happy reviewer, evidently a fan of Richard Wagner, contradicted Krehbiel’s assertion from a decade earlier that the work failed to project a Gaelic spirit:

This reviewer did not mention – and may not have known – that Beach’s “pearls” were published folk songs but found that her treatment of the melodic ideas had captured the emotional content she wanted to convey. In return, Beach expressed her appreciation from the stage: “To say that I am pleased with the Pittsburgh audiences is but faintly conveying my delight at my reception here and the enjoyment I have found in the recitals.”⁷⁵

About a decade later, the Kansas City-based composer and conductor Carl Busch programmed Beach’s symphony in an ambitious season-long series exploring national identity that included symphonies by Beethoven, Schumann, Franck, Glazunov, Sibelius, Svensen, Sinding, and Stanford. As one commentator remarked, Beach’s inclusion would afford “interesting comparison,” completing “in a becoming way this highly attractive and representative selection.”⁷⁶ In advance of the concert, Busch’s orchestra sponsored a class for audiences to hear an analysis of the symphony given by Sarah Ellen Barnes, a noted preconcert lecturer. And whatever she said must have worked. A reviewer for the Kansas City Times gushed about the piece’s suggestion of a national identity brought on by folksong references:

And it would go on to lead a happy life alongside Beach until her death in 1944.

Meanwhile, Beach’s concerto would also experience a significant critical rebound after its disastrous Boston premiere. Beach had taken the piece on a successful tour through Germany in 1913 and returned with it eighteen months later to great acclaim in a performance with the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra.⁷⁸ One local reviewer, Luella Keller, was so enthusiastic that she declared, “This is perhaps the greatest feat an American woman has performed in the musical world, and will be long remembered by those who saw it.”⁷⁹ The war in Europe had catalyzed nationwide interest in American compositions at this very moment, leading Beach and her concerto to be included on a program held at San Francisco’s Panama–Pacific International Exposition in August 1915 that featured music by seven other Americans, including Frederick Stock, who doubled as the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Although Beach’s performance received scant notice – and what notice it did receive was poor – Stock himself took up the piece in Chicago a few months later.⁸⁰

The momentum from Los Angeles that had stalled in San Francisco ramped up again in Chicago, where Stock was already well known for programming music by a wide array of American composers.⁸¹ Another budding composer, Eric DeLamarter, was enthralled after her performance. In a world now open to orchestral pieces inspired by song, he wrote in the Chicago Tribune:

Although he did not detect (or at least did not mention) any of the folklike qualities permeating the first movement, the piece’s debt to song was clear to him, as if he fully grasped her compositional process from the inside. A few weeks later, however, an enthusiastic reviewer in St. Louis, Richard L. Stokes, heard something particularly evocative – national sounds:

Though not with Louis Elson’s precision after the work’s Boston premiere, Stokes was emphatically trying to make sense of a work that did not quite fit into a conventional orchestral idiom. DeLamarter had pointed toward Grieg as a suitable comparison, but the best words Stokes could divine were “American” and “popular” – just as Beach might have hoped.

Although opportunities for Beach to perform her concerto faded with time despite audiences’ newfound admiration for it, the “Gaelic” Symphony practically became close to a canonical fixture as Beach earned a place as one of the country’s most distinguished composers in any genre. Some of the symphony’s most noteworthy performances during the later part of her career included those by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra (1915 and 1919), the Woman’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago under Ebba Sundstrom (1928 and 1934), Henry Hadley and the Manhattan Symphony Orchestra (1931), and the Women’s Symphony Society of Boston under Alexander Thiede (1940). At a concert in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, honoring Beach’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1942, the local orchestra and its founder, George King Raudenbush, programmed the symphony as a keynote. It was a smashing success – one with a critical response that echoed DeLamarter in its vindication of Beach’s song-based compositional approach. “While the symphony has all the richness and technical intricacies of an elaborate tapestry,” a critic for the Evening News began,

By this time, Beach was freely sharing the symphony’s folksong-based origins to guide listeners, ensuring they would make no mistake about what emotions she was trying to convey. That her themes were direct quotations had finally become a decided strength.

The Power of Song

The virtual disappearance of Beach’s orchestral music in the period between her death and the sustained revival of the 1990s betrays the fact that Beach’s orchestral music, written as a very early response to Dvořák’s ideas, was in certain respects ahead of its time in the 1890s, only to find its stride in the 1910s. This curious asynchrony suggests that certain compositional values emerged in the decades after Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony that rose and fell in tandem with Beach’s orchestral music. As I noted in the opening of this chapter, one of the first rigorous scholarly investigations of orchestral music from this period that drew on Afrodiasporic folksongs, written by a graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1941, three years before Beach’s death, noted:

Although the author, Eileen Jackson, focused her observations more specifically on compositions inspired by folk music of the African diaspora (“Negro folksong”), the more general compositional problem she described – how to integrate any song into a larger orchestral framework – had animated Beach’s approach to orchestral composition from Bal Masqué through the Piano Concerto. In each case, and as Beach herself explained, song provided her with an appropriate emotional “spark” that she would then attempt to grow into glowing embers and eventually a roaring fire with the “machinery” of counterpoint, developmental variation, and other advanced technical procedures.

As luck would have it, this very problem came to animate an entire generation of composers. Some of these composers, as Jackson goes on to explain, hewed more closely to Beach’s approach in the “Gaelic” Symphony by quoting songs, possibly hiding their origins, and working the melodic material sufficiently to retain the underlying emotional depth of the source tune. Others attempted to transcend their source material, as Beach was able to do in the first movement of the concerto with her invocation and transformation of Dvořák’s theme. Just as a critical mass of composers threw their proverbial hats into the arena of this style, Beach returned from Germany and was able to show that she had already created workable solutions to a seemingly vexing compositional challenge. Her work could then hold its own alongside an entire generation of composers who were tackling similar stylistic problems, many of whom, such as Texan Radie Britain (1899–1994), have likewise remained absent from most histories of American concert music from this period despite stunning popularity.

By 1944, Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony and Piano Concerto certainly would have sounded very old-fashioned next to Aaron Copland’s folksy but angular Appalachian Spring or even Florence Price’s cinematic Songs of the Oath, both of which date from that time. Yet the persistent vitality of Beach’s orchestral works during the three decades prior to her death signals that conductors, critics, and audiences valued something in this music that not only allowed it to remain on concert programs but also convinced Beach that writing new orchestral music might be self-defeating. That something was a kernel of song clothed in the garments of conventional symphonic structures. With two successful, popular, and idiomatically current pieces always at the ready, why would Beach risk disrupting a sterling compositional reputation with something new? Perhaps, ironically, song had made her orchestral career.

Introduction

On a spring day in New York City, I was in the catacombs of St. Bart’s on Park Avenue. In a room filled with canned goods to feed the homeless, my friend Paolo Bordignon (organist and choirmaster of St. Bart’s) and I were moving pallets of tomatoes and peaches to uncover shelves of neglected music. We found another piece by Amy Beach with each can of fruit we moved.

The dust on the boxes confirmed just how hidden these treasures were. On numerous occasions, my friend exclaimed, “I can’t believe this. I had no idea this was down here.” We found multiple copies of sacred choral works by Beach, in perfect condition, bound years ago by a professional binder, sharing space next to canned goods.

Even in an age of online repositories, these discoveries were exciting. Beach’s choral works are carefully cataloged through extensive scholarship, most notably by Adrienne Fried Block and Jean Reigles; however, that does not mean they are accessible. It is even less likely you have heard a performance of them. Paolo and I looked at each other in amazement and wondered how this could be the case.

It is easy to blame it on changing tastes, but that has not affected the works of other notable Victorians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Plenty of writing seeks to answer this question through sociological constructs, namely the place of women in classical music and upper-class family life during the turn of the twentieth century. Over the last generation, research into Amy Beach’s works has sought to correct this, yet several of her choral works remain inaccessible. For whatever reason, a lack of familiarity is often endemic to Amy Beach’s experience as a composer.

Historical Context

At the turn of the century, the landscape of choral music in America gave Beach an ample breeding ground for her compositions. American singing societies such as the Cincinnati May Festival, the Apollo Club of Chicago, the Mendelssohn Club of Pittsburgh, and the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston all came of age in or around Beach’s lifetime. These were undoubtedly informed or inspired by the numerous choir festivals in England. Much of the standard oratorio repertoire performed during this time was either written for or made prominent by festivals in Birmingham, Leeds, Norwich, and the famous Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester. While Beach may not have participated directly in one of these, she likely benefited from their influence – whether assimilating these scores in her self-directed study or through the inspiration these choral organizations and their concerts provided. Moreover, the Industrial Revolution in America produced a class of people with newfound wealth and leisure time. This translated into a boom for choral organizations as amateurs flocked to their ranks.¹

Churches also grew into prominent exponents of choral performance. Some of the nation’s most respected musicians worked for the church, especially in cultural centers like Boston and New York City, where Beach made homes. The list of organists and choirmasters who worked in these metropolitan areas reads like a venerable “who’s who” of early American art music: Lowell Mason, Horatio Parker, George Whitefield Chadwick, Dudley Buck, T. Tertius Noble, John Knowles Paine, Charles Ives, Clarence Dickinson, and Beach’s close friend David McKay Williams all left an indelible mark on the church and choral music in the early twentieth century. Before making his name as a conductor, even Leopold Stokowski began at St. Bartholomew’s in New York City. Beach’s output as a composer, specifically choral music, was deeply influenced by these cultural trends. Her output is tailored toward the rich resources of sacred institutions and the endless supply of singing organizations that cropped up throughout the United States.

Songs and choral works figure prominently among Beach’s compositional output. Adrienne Fried Block reports that writing songs was a way to clear her mind at the end of the day. “Beach claimed that song writing was recreation for her; when she felt herself going stale while working on larger pieces, she would stop and finish the day’s work by writing a song. ‘It freshens me up,’ she claimed. ‘I really consider that I have given myself a special treat when I have written a song.’”² Beach surely felt this way while writing her choral works. Many of her choral works contain large vocal solos, creating a Victorian form of the traditional English verse anthem.

Beach was very sensitive to the range and requirements of the singers. In a letter dated April 10, 1907, she negotiated extreme notes in her music with her publisher Arthur P. Schmidt Co. to find more comfortable solutions. “The high A I can easily modify by choice notes if you would kindly return the manuscript.” She went on to discuss low notes for the basses as well and clarified that she would like young singers to find the music “practicable.”³

We can categorize Beach’s works by their scope and by the context for which Beach wrote them. Her large-scale works include the Grand Mass in E-flat major and The Canticle of the Sun. Beach wrote medium-sized festival works such as the Festival Jubilate, Wedding Cantata, and The Chambered Nautilus. The rest of her works are small- to medium-scale works for the church and small secular choral works for male and female voices. The church works fall into two categories: small-scale works written in a modified motet or Anglican style with accompaniment and elaborate verse anthems that intermingle solo and choral sections. Her earliest choral compositions were a set of chorales written in 1882. Her last works in 1944 were compositions for women’s chorus: “Pax nobiscum” and “The Ballad of the P. E. O.” Choral music thus bookended her career.

These choral works were often an essential source of income in addition to being works of personal devotion. Block notes that late in Beach’s life, The Canticle of the Sun and Let This Mind Be in You were her most performed compositions.⁴ Beach’s will bequeathed her royalties to the MacDowell Association, and these choral compositions provided the colony with an important source of revenue.⁵ Her secular choral works, especially for male and female choruses, were written out of a sense of demand. Block writes, “The demand for women’s choral music grew during the first decade of the new century. Men as well as women responded to that need, but women seem to have a special affinity for the medium. … [P]ublishers, including Schmidt and G. Schirmer, instituted women’s choral series to serve the growing nationwide market.”⁶ When taken together, Beach’s choral output includes thirty-six sacred works (including the large-scale Grand Mass) and thirty-five secular choral works. Only her solo songs rival this output. When the songs and choral works are combined, Beach’s output comes into focus. She was a prolific composer for the human voice.

Religious Context

Amy Beach’s beliefs in religion profoundly influenced her sacred music. These religious views were formed at an early age by her mother and religious upbringing. About her religious education, Block writes: “She attended Sunday School at the Central Congregational Church in Chelsea and fell in love with her teacher – the only teacher other than her mother that she would have during the next few years. At age five she took to reading the Scriptures aloud, which she did with the clarity and emphasis of an adult.”⁷

She carried religion with her through the rest of her life. As a young adult, she was an active participant at Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston. Scholars have questioned her membership, reporting that she and her husband’s names are not on the church’s roll.⁸ Despite this, we know that Phillips Brooks (1835–1893), rector of the church and famous for writing the hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” was very influential. Jean Reigles reports in her dissertation, “The Choral Music of Amy Beach,” that “she and Brooks had frequent discussions regarding the topics of his sermons.”⁹ In 1911, after the death of her husband, she joined and was baptized at Emmanuel Church (Episcopal) in Boston.¹⁰

Upon moving to New York City in 1924, she immediately became established at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue. Her integration into the community and her friendship with music director David McKay Williams (1887–1978) led her to write some of her most interesting sacred choral compositions, many of which she dedicated to Williams. Let This Mind be in You, Canticle of the Sun, and Christ in the Universe all date to this inflection point in her career. Beach’s works featured prominently in the church’s centennial anniversary in 1935, and “Hearken unto Me” was written specifically for the celebration.¹¹

Beach went on to say that her sacred choral music held a special place for her among her works. “I think my church music appeals to me more than anything I have done. I have written anthems and oratorios and a whole Episcopal Service with great joy, and they have become a part of me more than anything I have done, I am sure.”¹² Her religious devotion continued to her death. Upon her death, Beach bequeathed her family jewels to Emmanuel Church in Boston, where she was baptized. Emmanuel Church declined the gift, so she offered them to St. Bartholomew’s.¹³ They hold a prominent place in the church to this day, having been ensconced in the church’s prized communion chalice.

The Grand Mass in E-Flat Major

Amy Beach’s most substantial choral composition was also her first major work. She began writing the Grand Mass in E-flat major in 1886. The project culminated in a premiere with the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston in 1892. Beach wrote the work for a quartet of soloists, full chorus, and orchestra.

A Grand Mass is a daunting proposition for a master composer, let alone an eighteen-year-old forced to educate herself after being denied even a composition teacher. A setting of the Mass proper, though, became a primary interest for Dr. Beach. He “incited her … to work on an audacious project, a mass for solo quartet, chorus, organ, and orchestra.”¹⁴ He believed this would solidify her reputation as a substantial American composer – a designation that would be more consistent with their social standing than just a performer or teacher.

Beach wrote the vocal and choral parts in 1886 and 1887. She worked on the orchestral score in 1889. Schmidt Publishing Company in Boston published the piano–vocal score before the premiere, which was uncommon. It allowed the work an opportunity to be reviewed by the Boston Beacon before it was performed. This led to interest in the work and its premiere in 1892. The Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, conducted by Carl Zerrahn, premiered the work. This would be the first time a major institution in the United States performed a multi-movement choral and orchestral work by an American female composer.¹⁵

The Mass was, by most accounts, a success. Philip Hale, music critic for the Boston Times, wrote, “the Mass is a work of long breath. It shows knowledge, skill, and above all application, patience, and industry.”¹⁶ Block writes, “In general most critics agreed that Beach’s Mass was a noble work that placed her – as one said – ‘among the foremost rank of American composers.’”¹⁷ Despite this, the Schmidt Company never published the full score. The Mass lay dormant until renewed interest in the work commenced over a hundred years later. The only performing edition available was a facsimile reprint of the manuscript until A-R Publications produced the new edition prepared by this author in 2018.¹⁸

The Mass is written in the oratorio style, using a multi-movement structure for the Gloria and Credo. The Gloria is split into four movements: Gloria, Laudamus Te, Qui Tollis, and Quoniam. The Credo is a single movement, but the three sections that comprise the setting are formally and thematically distinct, giving it the character of a multi-movement setting. The Sanctus and Benedictus are also separate. The Kyrie, Graduale, and Agnus Dei are each single movements inclusive of the text.

Beach favors thematic development over traditional formal structure. For example, the Kyrie follows a ternary model, but the return of the theme is condensed. The Gloria and the Credo and Et Resurrexit are declamatory in style and eschew formal concerns for a more through-composed model, providing variations on the initial motive throughout the movement. The opening theme and fanfare-type gesture of mm. 65–67 make up the material for the entire opening movement of the Gloria. The orchestral openings of the Credo and Et Resurrexit are the impetus for these movements.

Solos play a prominent role in movements where the text is more introspective or devotional. The Et Incarnatus Est is an extended soprano solo. The Laudamus Te opens with a trio accompanied by strings and harp and is followed by an expressive alto solo. The Qui Tollis, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei are dialogues between soloists and the chorus.

The Graduale, a movement entirely for solo tenor between the Gloria and Credo, was a late addition to the Mass. It was composed at the behest of the Handel and Haydn Society for their star tenor Italo Campanini (1846–96). Even the orchestral parts were completed before the movement was written – it was inserted at the end of the book as opposed to its proper place after the Quoniam. It was never included in an updated piano–vocal score.

The choral writing is mainly homophonic with light touches of counterpoint. The lone fugue is the Quoniam movement – traditionally a fugue in large-scale Masses by classical composers. The fugue consists of multiple expositions that culminate in homophonic conclusions. After each section, an orchestral interlude creates a transition to the next exposition. This formal design results in a somewhat abrupt ending, but Beach compensates for this through sonic saturation by employing the entire performing forces, resulting in an exuberant conclusion.

Thematically the Mass is unified by the opening of the work. The first two measures of the Kyrie recapitulate at different moments in the Mass, most notably in the Sanctus and the Dona Nobis Pacem. The Sanctus begins with a direct quotation of the Kyrie theme. The Dona Nobis Pacem begins with the Kyrie theme in the bass (m. 172), after which the theme is part of the overall texture.

Other unifying devices occur in the transition to the Dona Nobis Pacem, including quotations of the Benedictus and the four-note gesture deployed extensively in the Credo (mm. 158–66). Beach avoids the practice of reprising the Hosanna at the end of the Benedictus. Instead, she writes a brief seven-measure conclusion in a more ethereal effect (mm. 124–31) than the exuberant Hosanna that ends the Sanctus (mm. 45–91).

Harmonically, the Mass is Romantic in nature, employing chromatic harmonies. Beach enjoys creating tension by moving through key centers using diminished and augmented-sixth chords. Beach’s most common harmonic characteristic is her penchant for building to large climaxes, reminiscent of the English Victorian tradition. These climaxes appear in all the major movements, including the Kyrie (mm. 67–75), Gloria (mm. 246–74), Quoniam (mm. 120–53), Et Resurrexit (mm. 338–52), and Agnus Dei (mm. 112–28).

The orchestration is large, requiring a full complement of winds and strings, four horns, three trumpets in F (a common Romantic orchestration used by Bruckner and Mahler), three trombones, timpani, harp, and organ. The organ and harp parts are of particular interest. The opening sonority of the entire mass is an E-flat chord from the organ alone instead of the orchestra – a statement of individuality for the work and composer. The accompaniment of the Et Incarnatus Est was originally an organ solo for the entirety of the movement. The composer added strings later at the “crucifixus” text, as evidenced by an inserted handwritten page in the manuscript score. The harp plays an extensive cadenza at the opening of the Agnus Dei. A sublime cello solo accompanies the alto in the second half of the Laudamus Te. The overall effect of the orchestration is like that of the Requiems of Verdi and Berlioz: powerful in tutti sections, but economical and transparent for sensitive musical moments.

An immediate and intense conversation regarding the role of women in classical music, specifically in composition, followed the success of Beach’s Mass. Artists such as Dvořák and Rubinstein made unfortunate comments regarding the ability of female artists. Beach’s Mass stands in stark contrast to those opinions held by many at the time. Through her compositions, women’s suffrage in classical music had a new, though unassuming, advocate in Beach – and this body of work would prove those who stood in opposition to female composers as foolish.

Early Period Sacred Works

Her marriage, while restrictive by modern-day standards, was generally remembered fondly by Beach. She presented Dr. Beach a song each year on his birthday, sometimes a setting of his poetry. In turn, he lavished jewels on her and provided her with a beautiful home filled with parties and music. While giving up her life as a concert artist was likely a struggle, she later remembered her switch to composition as a chance to become even more notable. She wrote, “Though I had not deliberately chosen, the work had chosen me. My compositions gave me a larger field. From Boston, I could reach out to the world.”¹⁹

Regardless of how some people felt about women composing, Beach’s notoriety increased after the success of the Mass. This newfound fame led to a major commission for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, which celebrated the anniversary of Columbus’s famed voyage. Beach composed the Festival Jubilate, op. 17, to open the fair’s Woman’s Building on May 1, 1893. The work was deemed “dignified and elevated in style.”²⁰ These words must have been well received by Beach since the festival organizers almost rejected the work solely due to her gender.²¹

The structure is sectional, dividing the motivic material and the musical texture by text. Psalm 100 has a myriad of opportunities for exuberance and introspection. Beach dramatically explores them all. The harmonic language, though Romantic, is more stable than the chromatic sections of the Mass. Modulations involve fewer diminished chords, favoring secondary dominants and more direct modulations. Beach may have used Baroque cantatas and odes for ideas regarding design by evidence of the largo maestoso opening and grave transition between the second fugue and the coda. These transitional largo sections remind us of festival odes written by Purcell and Handel.

The Festival Jubilate exhibits a significant maturation in contrapuntal technique. After a fanfare and orchestral introduction, the chorus presents a fugue on the opening verse of Psalm 100. Whereas the Mass’ lone fugue is sectional with expositions being interrupted, the opening fugue to the Jubilate is more fluid as entrances connect more succinctly. One can sense that Beach felt more comfortable with her contrapuntal technique, treating the orchestra more colla parte (doubling the voices) and not relying on a separate texture to help keep the music moving forward. After a meditative section that contemplates the Lord’s goodness, Beach employs a second fugue displaying similar maturity. Even in homophonic sections, Beach allows the voices more independence – though glimpses of the Mass’ more declamatory style are present in the exuberant vivace (Schmidt edition, p. 14) and the ending “Gloria Patri” (Schmidt edition, p. 34).

Beach spent these early years focused on her larger concert works. However, she also wrote several smaller choral pieces used as service music. O Praise the Lord, All Ye Nations, op. 7, was composed in 1891 for the consecration of her close friend, Phillips Brooks, as Bishop of Massachusetts. She wrote three choral responses, including settings of the “Nunc Dimittis,” “With Prayer and Supplication,” and “Peace I Leave with You.” Three anthems for feast days were produced in “Bethlehem” and “Peace on Earth” for Christmas and “Alleluia, Christ is Risen” for Easter.

These works show Beach at her most economical to date while not sacrificing her voice and creativity. O Praise the Lord All Ye Nations and the Three Responses date before the Festival Jubilate, and one sees the similarities. Beach uses common-tone relationships, as seen in mm. 63–67 of O Praise the Lord All Ye Nations. A C-sharp diminished chord is followed by a B-flat chord in second inversion, only to return to a D major in first inversion. This common-tone relationship gives Beach a varied vocabulary in her smaller works, while avoiding an inaccessible harmonic language. We see similar motions by common tone in “With Prayer and Supplication” and “Peace I Leave with You.”

“Bethlehem” and “Alleluia Christ is Risen” remain in this economical style; however, we see Beach break out of these constraints in her Christmas anthem, “Peace on Earth.” Beach sets the familiar text, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” with a fluid sense of homophony and polyphony that characterize her later works. Her sense of drama is also more profound, illuminating each verse with just the right texture and mood. “Peace on Earth” is also the first small church work where Beach uses a soloist and duet during the piece, a form she preferred in her later church music – a welcome addition to her compositional arsenal given her penchant for songwriting.

“Peace On Earth” also uses the organ in a more independent way than previous works. The work begins with a fifteen-measure organ introduction. It accompanies the choir for the first verse but then dialogues with the choir in subsequent sections. The organ accompaniment in the middle section partners perfectly with the soloists and allows Beach to display her capability in art song writing. In Beach’s subsequent works, we will see the organ play a more prominent role, and her ability to write for this complicated instrument continues to improve.

That this piece is not in the standard repertoire for churches today is evidence that Beach sometimes suffers from a general lack of familiarity. “Peace on Earth” is worthy of performance by the most outstanding church choirs while accessible for any ensemble.

Beach concluded her early period with two ambitious choral works. Help Us, O God!, op. 50 (1903) is Beach’s lone attempt at a sectional motet in the style of a Bach or Brahms motet. The Service in A, op. 63, is her first multi-movement work intended for a church service.

Help Us, O God! is one of Beach’s few purely a cappella works, and one of her longest small-form sacred choral works. The work is comprised of texts from the book of Psalms and is designed in a sectional form that uses different voice textures in the style of Bach’s “Jesu Meine Freude.” The work is contrapuntally dense and harmonically progressive.

Despite the varied use of vocal texture, the lack of organ accompaniment restrains Beach from creating the dramatic contrasts found in earlier large-scale works. The primary device for this motet is the pure technique of composition. We see this in the fugue that ends the work – her most complex attempt at the form to date.

The Service in A embraces typical Anglican choral style. The primary responsibility of the choral parts is to proclaim the text in a melodic yet clear fashion. The organ features prominently as an equal partner with the voices. The harmonic language is decidedly Victorian. Beach deftly moves through keys without overly audacious sonorities – something that we do not expect in Anglican church music until the mature works of Herbert Howells (1892–1983). She employs suspension and augmented leading tones generously throughout the work.

As with the church works of Stanford, solos are important in these works. The “Te Deum” employs a soprano solo as an obbligato to the chorus. The slow section of the work uses a bass and alto solo. The “Magnificat” contains an extensive soprano solo, something common to settings of this text and likely a nod to Mary, who claims the text in the biblical story. The “Benedictus” and “Jubilate Deo” also contain extensive soprano solos, while the “Nunc Dimittis” uses a bass soloist.

Choral unison singing is another device Beach had not yet employed but is relatively common in Anglican service music. The “Te Deum” begins with an extended passage of choral unison singing, undoubtedly meant to illuminate the first moment of choral harmony on the word: “Holy!” (m. 47). The end of the “Te Deum,” “Nunc Dimittis,” and “Jubilate Deo” contain similar moments.

Each piece is unique based on the character of the text. In earlier compositions, Beach created contrasting dramatic effects to suit the text; but in these works, as we see in “Help Me, O God,” she prefers a more unified character throughout, choosing instead to paint the text with compositional technique and ingenuity. While Anglican composers have sometimes created structural unity in service music through repeated motives, especially during the “Gloria Patri,” Beach shows no such desire.

Despite this similarity to the preceding motet, the compositional language and style are much different, especially in Beach’s use of counterpoint. The polyphony is almost nonexistent in these service pieces. Imitation is briefly used at the end of “Benedictus” and “Magnificat” during the text “as it was in the beginning.” She forgoes this technique in the “Jubilate Deo” and “Nunc Dimittis,” preferring unison writing.

It seems Beach regarded these works in a more serious style than her previous church works. Beach uses 4/2 meter, but labels it cut time which, like “Help Me, O God!,” shows the influence of large works by Bach and Brahms. Both composers used this time signature in serious sacred works such as the B minor Mass, Ein Deutsches Requiem, and Geistliches Lied. Otherwise, the practice was uncommon until editors in the early twentieth century began using the meter to transcribe Renaissance music.

Early Period Secular Works

Beach’s most significant contributions to concert works date from her early period. The “Gaelic” Symphony, Piano Concerto, and Jephthah’s Daughter were all written before 1910. Her significant large-scale chamber works, except for the piano trio, were written before 1907. While she wrote secular choral music throughout her life, the most significant concert works – Three Shakespeare Choruses, op. 39; Sylvania, A Wedding Cantata, op. 46; The Sea-Fairies, op. 59; and The Chambered Nautilus, op. 66 – were also composed before 1907.

Beach often wrote her secular choral music for either all-female (SSA) or all-male choirs (TTB). There are sporadic secular works for SATB chorus, but the bulk of the works divide the genders, which is true even for the large-scale works. Sylvania is the only large-scale work of the four for SATB chorus – the rest are for SSA chorus. The Sea-Fairies and The Chambered Nautilus require orchestral accompaniment.

The Three Shakespeare Choruses were published in 1897. Written for treble voices, these pieces are the perfect fusion of English madrigal influence and nineteenth-century part songs. Romantic part songs were an important part of the European choral repertory in the nineteenth century. Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Schubert all contributed to this catalog, and these pieces exhibit this influence, especially in the decidedly early nineteenth-century Germanic harmonic language. However, Beach’s sensitivity to the English text led her to include madrigal-style imitative writing and tone painting in these intimate and beautiful settings.

Sylvania: A Wedding Cantata was published in 1901 and is indicative of a light secular cantata. It was premiered in 1905 at a private performance in Chickering Hall. The Boston Globe warmly received the work. The reviewer wrote, “The work is illustrative of a sylvan wedding, and both lines and music are redolent throughout of the whisperings of the forest, the caroling of birds and songs of elves and fairies. Like a midsummer night’s dream, it carries the auditor away into an age where all the world is young and innocent and beautiful.”²² Composed in five parts, the piece includes a cast of five soloists, a mixed chorus (her only large-scale secular work for SATB chorus), and an accompaniment for piano or orchestra. The text was “freely adapted from the German” by the Boston musician Frederick W. Bancroft (1856–1914).²³

The Sea-Fairies and The Chambered Nautilus were Beach’s most notable contributions to secular choral music, specifically to major works for treble chorus. Both pieces use four-part treble choirs and two soloists: soprano and contralto. The orchestral requirements for both works are almost the same: flutes, clarinets, horns, piano, and strings, though The Chambered Nautilus also requires bassoons. In both pieces, the piano plays an outsized role in the orchestration.

The Sea-Fairies is a single-movement piece in strophic form. The orchestra carries much of the thematic material while the chorus sings the text homophonically over the accompaniment’s images of the sea. Arpeggios from the pianist abound while orchestral instruments add to the color and texture in static material. Beach relies heavily on the orchestration to paint pictures of undulating waves.

The Chambered Nautilus uses many of the same ideas as The Sea-Fairies, especially regarding orchestration, use of piano, harmonic ambiguity, and primacy of the text in both choral material and in how the orchestration paints the images of the poetry. However, Beach treats the choir much more independently. There are more individual lines, more imitation, and more development of thematic material.

The Chambered Nautilus was commissioned by Victor Harris of the St. Cecilia Club of New York. Beach finished the work during the summer of 1907, and the work’s first performance was in 1908 by the St. Cecilia Club, who made it a staple of their repertoire in subsequent years.²⁴ A 1907 letter from American music theorist Percy Goetschius praised the work by contrasting it with modernist trends:

Goetschius’ evaluation is humorous given the work’s similarity to La Mer in its sea imagery.

Amy Beach’s world was about to change in 1910, and her style and compositional focus changed with it. The death of her husband in 1910 saw Beach turn more toward the church and her faith. Her ability to travel outside of Boston gave her opportunities to vary her musical taste and influences. Her integration into different churches and relationships with more musicians inspired her to hone her skills as a composer of sacred choral music. During the second half of her life, her choral output would include her most performed works, some of the most important parts of her legacy, and some of her own favorite compositions.

Middle Period

After Henry Beach’s untimely death in 1910, Amy Beach had the double-edged sword of a new life. Despite the freedom that Beach took advantage of through traveling and promoting herself as a composer and pianist, she was also grief-stricken. Block writes, “She would spend well over a year grieving before she could resume performing, and even then, she would find the life of a traveling pianist too stressful.”²⁶ When studying her output, there is a notable gap between 1910 and 1915. Whether it was out of grief or necessity, her life was most certainly interrupted.

Amy Beach’s choral compositions after her hiatus continued to display her love of writing for the voice. These works expand on the style she developed while writing the Service in A and “Peace on Earth.” In the years ahead, she continued to treat each line sensitively but did away with the confinement of fugue and polyphony. Soloists were employed often, and the organ continued to be a prominent participant in the action. Beach’s harmonic language continued to exploit borrowed chords and common-tone modulations, especially in her smaller works; however, in grand anthems and larger works, her chromaticism became more progressive and intense, especially in her choices of melodic material. Beach found her voice in these works, and she would speak with it through the rest of her career.

Her four-part setting of “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name” has all the characteristics of a composer jumping back into the pool. Written with a secular text originally for the Panama–Pacific Exposition in California, the work was reissued with Edward Perronet’s notable sacred text by Schmidt in 1915. The work is a delightful setting and the most accessible work thus far – its only modulations are two four-measure moves to the mediant, a noticeable departure from Beach’s standard procedure before.

If “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name” was Amy picking up her pen again, “Thou Knowest, Lord” was Amy being cathartic. The text by Jane Borthwick is hard to ignore, given Beach’s life circumstance and her return to musical composition.

It is difficult not to think about Beach reading the last line of this second stanza and picturing herself returning to her former strength. The author of the poem goes on to speak of “future gleams of gladness” and finding “a hiding place, a rest, a home.” “Thou Knowest, Lord,” feels like a statement of reemergence for Amy.

The piece is a welcome return to the Beach we began to see at the turn of the twentieth century. Written in the verse anthem form, it is strophic, with each strophe alternating between soloist and chorus. The piece also employs a more progressive harmonic language, easily moving through keys and chromatic alterations, especially in melodic material.

The final verse speaks of the Lord’s gentle call. Beach portrays this by having the chorus sing on a unison E-flat for twenty-one measures, only to give the chorus the tonic sonority for the final chord. During this chant, Beach provides the organist a recapitulation of melodic material. The effect of this texture is stunning, given the dense nature of the rest of the piece. It is as if Amy gives one last sigh of relief that her life is beginning to progress again.

Amy Beach seemed to be quite influenced by the texts she chose. When presented with an English poetic text, like “Thou Knowest Lord,” she employed a Victorian expressiveness, using a verse anthem form and progressive chromaticism. However, when given a biblical text, she preferred writing in a more conservative form or older style. She often telegraphs this by writing the title in Latin, even though the piece’s text is in English. Her Four Canticles, op. 78, display this practice.

Beach wrote her Four Canticles of 1916 for SATB chorus and organ. They are closer in style to the Service in A due to the easily discernible text setting. However, they still display Beach as an early twentieth-century American composer through her use of augmented leading tones and fluid chromaticism – frequently seen in many works of comparable composers from New England at the time.

Beach conceived the pieces as motets with organ accompaniment. Beach provides new music with each line of new text. She often uses imitation at the beginning of these new sections, but its deployment is brief. The preferred texture for these works is non-declamatory homophony. The lines retain independence, but Beach uses imitative counterpoint sparingly.

We also see this older style in the lack of solo writing. There is an obbligato soprano solo in “Bonum Est Confiteri,” and “Benedic, Anima Mea” opens with a bass solo that is strikingly short when compared to “Thou Knowest, Lord.” This lack of extended solos creates a clear contrast between the pieces Beach considers one part art song, one part choral work, and the pieces she conceives as strictly in anthem or motet form.

The raised fifth and flat-sixth, though certainly used before, become important harmonic devices for Beach. In the opening of “Bonum Est Confiteri,” we see both in the organ part (mm. 3, 10, and 12). These chromatic alterations, and others like raised fourths and sevenths, can be found throughout the other Canticles. In the opening of “Benedic, Anima Mea,” the raised fifth features prominently in measure 3. In “Deus Misereatur,” fourths and sevenths are raised but often in triadic formulae, so they feel like raised fifths (mm. 1–2, 4–5, 7–10).

Whereas the organ part is a collaborative partner in Beach’s Victorian verse anthems, the organ is much more subservient in these motet-style works. The organ’s material matches the choir with more frequency. The introductions and interludes are sparser than in verse anthem-style compositions. The technical requirements are much less demanding. Notably, “Benedic, Anima Mea” contains Beach’s only specific registration requirement in her works, asking that trumpet stops be used in the first two measures.

This contrast between the newer and older styles continues to appear, though on a smaller scale, with her subsequent two works, Constant Christmas, op. 95, and Benedictus Es Domine, op. 103. Constant Christmas is a setting of a poem by Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts and her longtime friend. Beach tempers her chromaticism, certainly a requirement of the text and possibly the performance context. It begins with an extended duet between alto and soprano. The chorus enters and concludes the piece in a simple homophonic fashion, proudly inviting us to run to the manger. Benedictus Es, Domine, displays the style used in the Canticle. The soloist occupies an obbligato role except for in the first six measures. Beach treats the choral parts more independently and uses imitative counterpoint at the end as she did in the Service in A. Both pieces use an economy of style that makes them delightful.

Beach’s other sacred compositions from this period – Lord of the Worlds Above, op. 109; Around the Manger, op. 115; Benedicte Omnia Opera, op. 121; and the Communion Responses, op. 122 – also display these general characteristics. Benedicte, written for David McKay Williams, and the Communion Service, written for Raymond Nold,²⁷ contain some of Beach’s most austere chromaticism until this point. These pieces’ melodic material and harmonic instability prefigure the voice she will use in her serious works of the later period.

Amy Beach’s most significant contribution to sacred church music is her anthem, Let This Mind Be in You, op. 105, along with The Canticle of the Sun, op. 123, her most performed and likely most lucrative sacred choral work. Beach wrote this piece in Victorian verse anthem style. The extended opening for bass and soprano solo shows Beach at her most expressive and secure. The chromaticism is accessible yet interesting, especially in the melodic material. The raised tones in the bass solo provide the perfect combination of well-written melodic construction and creativity (mm. 1–22).

The chorus’ a cappella entrance is stark and subtle. The diminished chord and the following measure’s conclusion on a half-diminished chord creates an ambiguity that prepares for the piece’s satisfying conclusion (mm. 52–53). The final section contains some of Beach’s most characteristic compositional ideas. The chorus sings mostly in unison for the text, “and that every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” While the chorus is singing in unison, the organ deploys a dominant pedal point and thick sonorities in a sequential pattern. The result is reminiscent of the building of tension seen in the climactic portions of the Mass (m. 79). After the climax is achieved, the organ subsides. The chorus, still in unison, employs a flat sixth on the word God before allowing the piece to conclude with a luminous A-flat chord.

The energy Beach put into her sacred works, along with her busy performing schedule, must have taken their toll. Her secular choral music from this time is sparse – only five entries between 1915 and 1917. These consist mainly of small arrangements for children’s choir, which were unpublished. The aforementioned Panama Hymn, op. 74, was reissued as a sacred piece. “The Candy Lion” is arrangements of solo songs for female chorus, leaving Dusk in June, op. 82, her only original secular choral composition from the middle period.

Beach’s maturation as a composer is evident in these works from her middle period. These works contain a stylistic variety that morphed into a singular voice as she became more comfortable with her new life. This maturation subsequently flourished into some of her most substantial choral works. These works display wisdom and ingenuity while also being inspired by her new life in New York City, the church she invested herself in, and the people she would know as her closest and dearest friends.

Late Period

Beach began spending significant time in New York City in the 1920s. Her routine during touring was to split her time between the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and New York City. In 1930, Beach moved to New York City full time. Beach loved her constant encounters with art. She wrote to her friend Lillian Buxbaum, “The New York life never seemed more fascinating, and I never felt more enthusiasm.”²⁸ She filled her schedule with concerts, theater, and social activities. The consistent stimulation must have been overwhelming and inspiring.

Beach also became a member of St. Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue. St. Bart’s was (and still is) a grand church known for its exemplary music and fine preaching. Preaching was always important to Beach. Robert Winkworth Norwood (1874–1932), rector of St. Bart’s at the time, was a well-known theologian and author. Her attraction to him and the church is consistent with the spiritual nourishing she sought, especially after her husband’s death.²⁹

It was St. Bart’s that provided the premiere of Beach’s most well-known (at the time) choral composition, The Canticle of the Sun, op. 123, for chorus, SATB soloists, and an orchestra of strings, winds, four horns, two trumpets in F, and timpani, which was published and premiered in 1928 but composed several years earlier.³⁰ It is Beach’s most operatic sacred choral work. It was an immediate hit, especially with the congregation at St. Bart’s, where the work was performed annually – though with organ accompaniment, as their tradition had been for all major works. Her publisher, Arthur P. Schmidt Co., also praised the work in a letter to Beach on June 29, 1928, calling it “most effective.”³¹

The work is sectional and constructed around a four-note motive, reminiscent of a Renaissance cambiata, introduced as an ostinato in the bass in the first nine measures. The ostinato breaks off and then repeats itself up a third. This cell gives the work structural unity so that Beach can treat each new verse with a new texture and affect. The motive appears in the orchestration and melodic material – notably in solos and as a point of imitation over the words, “Bless ye the Lord,” throughout the work. The effect is a multi-movement cantata that is through-composed.

Beach uses choral unison to prepare sudden dramatic chords in wide textural ranges and dissonant diminished sonorities. These sudden flourishes resemble the dramatic turns seen in the opening of Haydn’s Creation. Beach treats the chorus as a homophonic instrument, preferring to bring out the text through clear declamation and dramatic intent outside of the point of imitation at the end and other rare occurrences.

The grandness of Beach’s vision often overcomes the more subtle moments of the Canticle. However, the work ends with a great hush on the word “humility,” showing that the text for Beach often consumed architecture. Whereas some composers would have preferred a vivacious ending to such an extroverted work and possibly reconfigured text or musical ideas to achieve this, Beach stays faithful to the requirements of the words. While the conclusion feels abrupt, one must respect Beach’s authenticity and strength of ideal.

Beach’s most substantial church works from this late period were written for the St. Bartholomew community, specifically her friend David McKay Williams, organist and choirmaster of the church. Block notes her attraction to Williams as a musician and person: “In church, Beach habitually sat on the left side of the sanctuary and as far back as possible so that she could watch Williams at the organ. She treasured every moment she spent with him, often recording in her diary the precise duration of their meeting or shared meal or evening of bridge and music.”³² The platonic relationship between the two was one Beach treasured, and it led her to write some of her most progressive sacred choral works.

Hearken Unto Me, op. 139, was written for the 100th anniversary of the church in 1934. In this seminal piece, Beach used an expanded version of the verse anthem form. After a dramatic organ introduction that includes a half-diminished chord on G as the first full sonority and concludes on an E chord with an added seventh and ninth, the tenor cries “Hearken unto me!” as if he walked onto the stage at the Met. The entire composition feels like a mini opera sung in church. The chorus has a short interjection during the opening section, but the solo quartet generally dominates the piece. The chorus features more prominently at the end when they accompany the soaring soprano and tenor soloists. The range of these solos, along with the repeated triplet chords in the organ, gives the sense that we are listening to a new Amy Beach – one inspired by her surroundings: the theater; the fabulous singers at St. Bart’s, including Ruth Shaffner, soprano soloist and the person that would become her trusted confidant; and David McKay Williams, the person who would champion her music for the rest of her career.

Other works would fall into this category. “O Lord God of Israel,” op. 141, written in 1936, was one of the few works not published by Schmidt, existing only in facsimiled manuscripts in the library of St. Bart’s and at the repository located at the University of New Hampshire. I Will Give Thanks, op. 147, written in 1939, appears to be more conservative in style but allows for Beach’s more operatic impulses in the middle of the piece. A soprano soloist pierces the work’s texture, relegating the choir to accompaniment while the soloist, through a melodic sequence, climbs to a high C.

Beach’s last major choral composition in length and scope is Christ in the Universe, op. 132, written in 1932. Again dedicated to Williams, this is Beach’s most complex and modern work. The text by Alice Meynell, a British writer and suffragist, is a striking example of twentieth-century mysticism. The opening line, “with this ambiguous earth, his dealings have been told us,” handed Beach a blank canvas that she chose to paint with the most tonally ambiguous music she had written thus far. Beach does not establish a key until the chorus enters in m. 49. The key is fleeting as Beach slides back into an enchanting and progressive chromaticism that lasts throughout the work.

While rivaling the Canticle in length, Christ in the Universe is a sprawling fantasia instead of a sectional work. Material is linked together with organ interludes or additional vocal solos. Themes, though varied, are not different enough to merit the designation of a multi-movement cantata. This work is the ultimate expansion of her anthem form. The chorus, soloists, and organ are all equal partners in a lush work containing a plethora of harmonic twists and turns that would have made twentieth-century modernists quite proud. In her dissertation on Beach’s choral music, Reigles notes: “The entire first 32 bars remind the listener Dr. William T. Allen³³ of Debussy and Scriabin, the latter perhaps because of the piano patterns. According to Dr. Allen, ‘we are still in tertian structure, and hanging on to tonality by our teeth,’ by means of the implied leadings of dominant harmony.”³⁴ Outside of its premiere on April 17, 1932, performances of this piece are undocumented.³⁵ The intense chromaticism may be a factor, but the work shows Beach at her most creative and harmonically extravagant.

Conclusion

Amy Beach’s choral music makes up a significant portion of her output. The Grand Mass still endures as her most substantial composition – an amazing accomplishment for a young composer. Beach’s church music explores a wide array of styles, from traditional Anglican church music to mini cantatas that bring operatic style to the Episcopal Mass. Her secular choral music includes significant contributions to women’s choir repertoire. Her harmonic language progresses from Victorian uses of augmented leading tones and suspension to modernist deployments of ambiguous tonality. Her love of art song informs her use of the solo vocal line and the organ as an equal partner in the works’ textures. Amy Beach’s reemergence will only benefit from a continued and thorough examination of her as one of America’s most important composers of sacred choral music.

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:

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:

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:

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.

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:

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.

The Silhouette vol. 27 (1930), pp. 108–109.

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].”

Box 3, folder 5, Amy Cheney Beach (Mrs. H.H.A. Beach) Papers, 1835-1956, MC 51, Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH.

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.