Notes for: July 27, 2021
One of the many upsides of the attention newly being paid to women composers is that Amy Beach finally is starting to get the attention she deserves. Although her compositions and recitals made her a musical celebrity in turn-of-the-20th-century America, after her death she largely disappeared from the musical radar.
Beach had to fight against sexism her entire life. A brilliant pianist, at 18 she married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, who asked her to focus on composing rather than performing. Because women weren’t thought to be capable of learning composition, she taught herself harmony and counterpoint, and her work soon brought her widespread recognition. But always there was an edge to the applause. When the Boston Handel and Haydn society presented her Mass in E-Flat in 1892, one critic found it “difficult to associate with a woman’s hand.” When the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered her acclaimed “Gaelic” Symphony in 1896, another critic praised it as “manly.” And in public she was always “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.” After her husband died in 1910, she went to Europe, where she resumed her career as a widely admired pianist and composer. She returned to the U.S. in 1914 and remained here until her death, composing prolifically, concertizing, and championing the work of American women composers.
Beach’s distinctive voice informs her masterful Piano Quintet in F-Sharp Minor. As Brahms did in his F Minor Piano Quintet, Beach begins with an atmospheric Adagio, with hushed unison strings playing against the piano’s restless arpeggios and octave scales. What follows in the moody and passionate Allegro moderato is an emotional journey built around two main themes, the first a yearning motive presented by the strings, the second a more lyrical theme presented by the piano. Beach shows her gift for high drama in the development and recapitulation, and what one critic called her “lush, late-Romantic chromatic harmony” here and throughout the Quintet.
The poetic Adagio expressivo is an emotionally intense movement that encompasses both passion and tranquility. It’s an island of calm before Beach plunges into a turbulent Allegro agitato that features, among other highlights, stunning mood shifts, eerie tremolos, a fugal passage, the return of the opening Adagio, a fiery Presto, and a formidable piano part throughout. It’s a thrilling end to a work that has the grand sweep and emotional depth of the great piano quintets of the Romantic era.