Notes for: July 16, 2019
Amy Beach was a groundbreaker who challenged expectations for women. In her day and beyond, the odds were stacked heavily against women composers. As Antonin Dvořák opined to a Boston reporter in 1892, “The ladies… have not the creative power.”
Yet Beach, a prodigiously talented composer and pianist, already had taken the Boston musical world by storm. At 18 she made a triumphant debut as a soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1892 – the year of Dvořák’s comment – the Boston Handel and Haydn Society presented her Mass in E-Flat Major, their first work by a woman; it was hailed as a masterpiece. In 1896 the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered her acclaimed Gaelic Symphony, the first symphony written by an American woman and the first by a woman to be played by a major orchestra. (As a sign of the times, one critic praised it as “manly.”) Meanwhile, at 18 she had married Dr. Henry Beach, a doctor more than twice her age, who persuaded her to give up performing and focus on composing. The few times she did play in public, it was as “Mrs. H.H.A. Beach.” After her husband died in 1910, she set off for Europe and, as Amy Beach, she resumed her career as a much-admired soloist and composer. She returned to the United States at the outbreak of World War I and spent the rest of her life concertizing during the winter, composing during the summer, and supporting other women composers. In addition to her larger compositions, her prolific output included chamber works and many art songs.
The Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, which Beach wrote on commission from the San Francisco Chamber Music Society, is a glowing example of her gifts and her appeal. It is an ambitious work, distinguished by Beach’s contrapuntal prowess and her wonderful ear for harmonic color. The first of many delightful surprises comes early. After the strings introduce the lyrical Romantic theme, the flute ushers in the first variation with an exotic-sounding, Debussy-like solo. There are rewards in each of the variations. The playful syncopated second is contrapuntally adroit, the waltz-like third harmonically adventurous, the fleet fourth propelled by rapid triplets. The cello introduces the rich and expressive fifth variation, which features a return of the fourth variation’s triplets and of the flute’s opening solo. All the strands are tied together in the last variation, which begins with a cheerful fugue and closes, satisfyingly, with the original theme and the flute’s exotic song.
This year the New York Philharmonic is celebrating the centennial of the 19th amendment by commissioning 19 new works by women. Beach – who co-founded the Society of American Women Composers – would have been pleased.