A Beach Reclaimed

Question. Who was the most celebrated American composer of the 1890s and pre-WWI period? John Paine? George Chadwick? Horatio Parker, or his iconoclastic student at Yale Charlie Ives? It was none of these. The answer is Mrs. H.H.A Beach. This is not feminist revisionist history; it’s a fact. At a time when the American classical music world was dominated by Europe, Beach’s Symphony of 1896 received its premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and her Mass of 1892 by Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society. The New York Symphony Society under Walter Damrosch commissioned a work of her, as did the renowned conductor Theodore Thomas. Beach’s chamber works were regularly met with public enthusiasm both in the U.S. and in Europe, where she was called the leading American composer. Royalties from her song “Ecstasy” were so great they alone allowed her to purchase land on Cape Cod.

Mrs. Beach must have been a formidable figure. A descendant of New England colonials, born Amy Marcy Chaney, in 1867, she grew up in social circles which included Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and others distinguished in their day who monitored young Amy’s development as a musician. She could hum dozens of tunes accurately by the time she was one, and improvise lines against her mother’s singing by age two. She was reading music at three, and by seven had given her first public piano recitals. At eighteen Amy Marcy Chaney was an established virtuoso pianist and star of musical Boston, when she married Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a Harvard physician twenty-four years her senior. Dr. Beach persuaded her to curtail her performing to a single recital a year, and concentrate on composition. This poor chump has been vilified in recent decades for stifling the pianistic genius of his young wife, though in fact his shrew persuasion led directly to the development of America’s first great composer, for it was during her marriage to Henry that Amy wrote her greatest works. Following her husband’s death after twenty-five years of marriage, Mrs. H.H.A. Beach resumed a performing career.

She was well read in philosophy and science, fluent in German and French, and headed the Music Teachers National Association, as well as co-founded and served as first president of the Society of American Women Composers. Late in life she wrote, “I have literally lived a life of two people; one a pianist, the other a writer. Anything more unlike than the state of mind demanded by these two professions I could not imagine! When I do one kind of work, I shut the other up in a close room and lock the door. One great advantage, however, in this kind of life, is that one never grows stale, but there is always a continual interest and freshness from the change back and forth.”

So what happened to the results of all that interest and freshness? Why did none of her works remain in the active repertoire? Where did Mrs. H.H.A. Beach disappear to? Among the answers I’ve read is that Amy was doomed to obscurity because her music followed trends rather than set them. She was at various times in her sixty-year career a Brahmsian romantic, a reluctant impressionist, an assimilator of American nationalist themes, and more. Her music was timely, not timeless, and now belongs exclusively to its own time. Which is not to say that it is not also exquisitely crafted.

Today efforts are afoot to bring Amy Marcy Beach back into the American musical mainstream where she once reigned. Writings about her life and music have appeared. Performances and recordings continue to increase, including an ambitious series of recordings a while back from the New York-based Arabesque label, which spanned her entire career, from her Brahmsian married life to the heyday of her MacDowell Colony residencies when she produced a String Quartet with a shake of dissonance and Eskimo themes; to her final years when, says Beach scholar A.F. Block, “life was beginning to close in on her; and it was time to tie up loose ends, to work out some of the compositional schemes she still had ‘docketed away’ in her head.”

Hearing Beach’s music for the first time can be a fresh and yet strangely familiar experience, in the way one might come upon paintings by Asher B. Durant, Thomas Daughty or lesser lights from the Hudson River School. They are beautifully made, aged with the patina of the past, and while we may not know the works or the artists themselves, we recognize the style.