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who was 24 years her elder and a widower. He had followed her career While she would continue
from the time she was a child in part because he was also a musician, to do these kinds of pieces
albeit on an amateur level. throughout her career, Beach
One of the conditions of their marriage was that Amy stop working would go on to do much
as a piano teacher and restrict her public performances to two a year, larger and more complex
with the profits donated to charity. Dr. Beach wanted a wife, not a pieces including major
concert pianist. Amy agreed but wrote: “I thought I was a pianist first orchestral works, choral
and foremost.” He did, however, encourage her to work as a composer. works, chamber works,
A dutiful wife, Mrs. Beach channeled her musical energies into church music, and cantatas.
composing and became known publicly and professionally as Mrs. H.
H. A. Beach. For many years, Amy held weekly musical soirees at Beach’s Work
their Commonwealth Avenue home, during which she encouraged
other composers and performers. The Boston Classicists Arthur Hits the Stage
Foote, George Chadwick and Horatio Parker welcomed her as “one of In 1892, Beach’s first
the boys.” major work was performed,
Mass in E-flat Major,
numbered Opus 5. It was a
A Self-Taught Composer 75-minute piece written for
Amy’s husband’s restrictions chorus, vocal quartet,
on public performances and his soloists, orchestra, and
belief that formal study might organ. The mass was per-
inhibit her originality required formed by the Handel and
that she become a virtually Haydn Society with the
self-taught composer. Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Beach had received one year This marked the first time a
of formal training at the age of composition written by a
15 when she studied harmony woman was performed by
and counterpoint with Junius these groups. One modern-
W. Hill (1840-1916), an day critic calls Beach’s Mass
organist, composer, and in E-flat major, “a colorful,
Professor of Music at Wellesley dashing work.”
College. With that foundation, she went on to study music theory, That same year, Beach
counterpoint, musical form, and instrumentation on her own. She had her second work
studied Bach’s fugues by writing out her version of one of his works performed, an aria entitled
then comparing it to the original, and taught herself orchestration by Eilende Wolken, Segler der
writing notations of themes she heard at concerts, looking at the origi- Lüfte (Wand’ring Clouds, Sail Opening of Movement IV
nal score, and then putting the versions side by side. through the Air) for contralto and orchestra, based on Friedrich von
Beach’s first works were poems that she liked, set to her original Schiller’s Mary Stuart. Beach was asked to write this for Mrs. Carl
music. Her first published piece while studying with Hill was a song to Alves, who had been the alto soloist for the premiere of Mass in E-flat
the poem of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Rainy Day. major. The first performance of Eilende Wolken was given by the
Symphony Society of New York. Again, this was the first work arranged
by a woman to be performed by this group.
Beach went on to write Festival Jubilate, op. 17 for the 1893 World’s
Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and Song of Welcome, op. 42,
commissioned for the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha.
But it was Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony, which premiered in Boston in
1896 with Emil Paur conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra,
that shattered the glass ceiling. Gaelic was the first symphony to be
composed and published by an American woman.
Beach’s Gaelic Symphony was not taken seriously by critics at the
time due to her gender. Compared to Dvorak and Chadwick, Beach’s
music was described as “delicate,”
“beautiful” and “tender.” It was From Take O Take Those Lips Away
striking that many of the quotes,
whether positive or negative,
couldn’t help but mention
Beach’s gender in relation to the
music, while “the most negative
critics displayed heightened
anxiety over the emergence of a
truly valid American symphonic
voice capable of speaking to
international audiences.” This is
what people had been hoping for
in the “great American symphony;”
however, for some, the fact that
this voice was coming from a
woman was the sole thing
rendering the attempt invalid.
At left, the choral score for
Mass in E flat

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