Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer, 1867-1944

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THE

LIFE AND WORK OF AN

AMERICAN COMPOSER 1867-1944

Adrienne Fried Block

New York

Oxford

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Oxford University Press

1998

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Aukland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1998 by Adrierme Fried Block Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Block, Adrienne Fried. Amy Beach, passionate Victorian : the life and work of an American composer, 1867-1944 / Adrienne Fried Block. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index, ISBN 0-19-507408-4 i . Beach, H. H. A., Mrs., 1867-1944 2. Composers—United States— Biography. 3. Women composers—United States—Biography. I. Title. ML4io.63665-6 1998 780'.92—dc2i 97-2710 [B] The MacDowell Colony. Inc., heir to the unpublished materials of the Estate of Amy Beach, has generously given permission to reproduce photographs, manuscripts, and memborabilia from library collections. The following publishers have given permission to use quotations from copyrighted works. "Night Song at Amalfi," in the Collected Poems of SamTeasdale, copyright 1937 by Macmillan Publishing Company; copyright renewed 1965 by Morgan Guarantee Trust Company of New York, reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster. "Rendez-vous," by Leonore Speyer, in A Conopic Jar, copyright 192 i by E. P. Dutton & Co., reprinted by permission of A. A. Knopf and Bankers Trust Company, New York. "Hillcrest," in The Collected Poems of E(hvin.AiIingion Robinson, copyright 1916 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1944 by Ruth Nivision, reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster. The Poems ofWilliom Ernest Henley, copyright 1898 by Charles Scribner's Sons, renewed 1926, reprinted by permission of Scribner, a. division of Simon and Schuster. Publication of this book was supported in part by a grant from the H. Earle Johnson fund of the Sonneck Society for American Music.

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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PREFACE [H]ow inevitable it was that music should be my life's work. Both in composition and piano playing, there seemed to be such a strong attraction. . . . that no other life than that of a musician could ever have been possible for me. (Amy Beach to Mrs. Edward F. Wiggers, 24 August 1935).

IN 1917 AMY BEACH TURNED FIFTY. If in that year someone had proposed a fullscale biography, people would have found it a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The only objection might have been that it was too soon to be definitive, that her life's course was only partially run. Over the preceding thirty years, feature articles and interviews giving biographical information appeared in newspapers and music journals with considerable frequency, whetting the public's appetite for more. To women she was a heroine, not as glamorous as a diva perhaps, but all the more remarkable for having ventured into a field of composition thought to be the exclusive preserve of men—and having succeeded. To some, Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was thoroughly admirable; to others, one who overstepped her boundary; but to both groups, an object of interest if not curiosity. The earliest evidence of public interest in Amy Marcy Cheney was an article written when she was seven, reporting a private recital that included two unnamed works, one by Chopin and one by her. It marked her for the public as a child prodigy. There is a mythic aura about a child who instinctively knows how to play the piano and compose. Amy Cheney was fortunate in that her family had moved from Henniker, the small New Hampshire town where she was born, to Boston, an ideal place for a gifted child to grow up. As she said, Boston was a "very musical" city; it also took pride in and supported its own performers and composers. Together with professional musicians, members of Boston's social and cultural elite heard her play in drawing rooms and salons and adopted her years before her debut. They found the girl irresistible and the teenager gifted and charming and with enormous potential. Part of her attraction was that she was one of their own, a Yankee like them, and a girl with extraordinary promise. Her musical gifts undergirded her ambition, which was strong enough to launch a performing career despite parental opposition. She became the first American concert pianist to succeed with local training. Thus she helped demolish notions that only those trained in a German conservatory could make

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a go of it. Her debut at sixteen, which took place in Boston's main concert hall, had outstanding reviews; thereafter, she had a devoted concert audience of Bostonians. Her early success took place against a background of contention over women's roles as musicians. Despite this, Beach's life in music was defined by two quests: a global audience for herself as performer and composer and for solutions to compositional problems. Those dual quests meant living a public life and a life devoted to work. As Carolyn Heilbrun notes, it was a narrative women were rarely empowered to pursue and even more rarely lived. Beach eventually lived this narrative but only after surmounting some sizeable obstacles. Her parents' opposition to a concert career was the first. They allowed her a debut but not the necessary next steps for building an international career. The second was marriage, which put an end to her career as a local recitalist, but had the effect of focusing her energies on composition. Now instead of Amy Marcy Cheney, her professional name for most of the rest of her life was Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, thus masking her former identity in the distinguished name of her new husband, Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, M. D. Both parents and husband opposed her studying composition with a teacher, to her great disappointment. She turned that defeat into a triumph by teaching herself whatever she needed to know about composition and orchestration. Wisely, she also continued to practice piano, giving one or two public performances a year, occasionally playing a concerto with orchestra. She soon added her own piano solos and chamber works to her concert repertory. Critics reviewed her programs as much for her new works as for her playing. Thus, in a limited way, she circumvented the agreement with her husband to abandon her concert career after marriage. Her first recognition as a composer came when at age twenty-one, she played Beethoven's third piano concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. For the occasion she had written her own cadenza, a lengthy essay on Beethoven's themes. Critics hailed it as substantial evidence of her promise as a composer. When her Mass, op. :, was played, critics and public could finally take her measure as a composer. The work, which takes over an hour, was given by 349 members of the leading American chorus, the Boston Handel and Haydn Society, and accompanied by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was so successful that her name became known well beyond Boston and immediately generated two commissions. The first was for a concert aria given its premiere by the New York Symphony, conducted by Walter Damrosch; the other was for chorus and orchestra and conducted by Theodore Thomas at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Her second even bigger success, the "Gaelic" Symphony, op. 32, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896, moved an audience to intense displays of approval and the critics to much praise—not unmixed with caveats. A letter to Beach after the premiere from Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick made her acceptance official in the so-called Second New England School of Composers. The symphony produced amazement in late

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nineteenth-century minds because a woman had written ior orchestra, taming the unwieldy medium with mastery. All but one of the major American orchestras performed it during the next two decades. Her fame was then truly national. Its spread was helped substantially by the timely publication of everything she wrote between 1885" and 1914 by the firm of Arthur P. Schmidt, as part of his commitment to support Boston's composers. This in turn encouraged many more performances. Boston's musical establishment and Amy Beach herself were responsible for the majority of performances of her -works during her Boston years. As a composer, she needed such exposure to further the development of her craft as well as to build the fine reputation she earned even before turning thirty. Press criticism helped as well in establishing her as a composer. Even their occasional attacks on aspects of her compositions served to show how seriously they took her music. However, Beach learned early to let the audience be her guide, valuing its response to her music more than that of any professional reviewer. And respond people did—to her emotional depths, her lyricism and, if sophisticated listeners, to her solid compositional designs. Performers loved her work as well. Her reputation rippled, out from Boston as the divas of opera's Golden Age adopted her songs. Her chamber music found illustrious players and enthusiastic audiences not only in the United States but also in Europe, as later her orchestral pieces would. Amy Beach was truly an American pioneer as a composer and the first successful woman in the field. Being the token woman in the composition of high art music had its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it helped spread her fame; on the other, it suggested that as a woman composer she was an aberration. Nevertheless, weighed in the balance against doubters and detractors were her great gifts, her concentration on work, her location in Boston, and her timing: she was able to ride the crest of the first feminist movement. The next generation of women composers found courage in Beach's record as a pathfinder and model, formalizing her role with the honorific title of dean of American women composers. Personal tragedy struck in 1910 with the accidental death of her husband, effectively ending her life in Boston. Grieving and alone but also newly in charge of her life, Beach decided to return to her career as a performer -while promoting her own works on the concert stage. She was free to go to Europe, where she stayed for three years and found enthusiastic reception for her major chamber and orchestral works and for her playing. She placed her career on the line in Germany and won, despite the traditional hostility of local critics toward Americans and women. A manager made sure that her European successes were regularly reported in the American press. Returning reluctantly to the United States at the outset of World War I, she had a heroine's welcome in Boston. Outstandingly successful years followed during which she crisscrossed the country giving recitals. Beach told the press that she enjoyed nothing more than traveling to a new place and conquering a new audience. All that touring left little time for creative work. To compose she needed a place out of the city and surrounded by nature. Beach tried out one locale after

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another, and in 192 i she found the ideal solution: her favorite place, where she composed almost everything from that time on, was the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Although she spent only one or two months there each year, she composed quickly once she sat down with pencil and manuscript paper and greatly increased her productivity over that of the previous decade. For her winter residence she eventually settled in New York, where she found a pied-u-terre in 1930, taking full advantage of the city's rich musical life as participant and auditor. During the second half of her life, her style became more adventurous in response to the revolutionary changes in twentieth-century music. Yet Beach rejected the ultra-modern and searched successfully for a middle way, out of a belief that music must be the product of both intellect and emotion. That ideology grew naturally out of her own persona, a combination of strong feelings and Bostonian propriety. Indeed, except for music, her attitudes were class-bound and conservative. Yet she was a warm, giving person, much concerned about others, and particularly involved in helping younger women musicians through their organizations and directly as a loving friend. Amy Beach believed that music must be shared and lived her life by that principle. In writing her life, I have tried to place it in context, to show what it meant to straddle two centuries from her birth during the expansive Victorian era through two world wars and a depression. In sharing her life, I hope most of all to help others share in her music.

A NUMBER OF PEOPLE HAVE raised objections to the name "Amy Beach" on the grounds that she was known after her marriage as Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. That is the truth, but not the whole truth. There was a handicap to that name which she herself recognized: in later life it marked her as a Victorian holdover at a time when she wished to be viewed as a contemporary composer. In Europe after her husband died, Beach changed her name to Amy Beach. She also published an autobiographical article under that name in an American magazine, thus taking the first step toward renaming herself back home. When someone asked her if she were the daughter of Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, however, she suddenly realized how indelibly her identity back home was tied to the latter name. On her return to the United States at the beginning of World War I, she again called herself Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. Small indications of her continuing desire to change the name surfaced: the name on her bookplate (Amy M. Beach) and on stationery she used late in life (Amy Beach). But evidence that she wished to be remembered as Amy Beach is in her last will and testament. In it she set up a fund for the MacDowell Colony to receive royalties and performance fees earned by her music—they were and are now substantial—called the Amy Beach Fund. Those who honor her memory do so by respecting her final wish. New York City 1997

A. F. B.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WORK ON THIS BOOK OFFICIALLY began in 1986 with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities that supported a year's research at major Beach repositories as well as many smaller collections and at the places where Beach lived and worked. The Sonneck Society for American Music also supported this book with a generous publication subvention. A grant from the Sinfonia Foundation supported computerization of the data with the expert assistance of Andrea Goodzeit. A brief residency at the Newberry Library in Chicago permitted the exploration of documents relating to the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. I express my thanks and gratitude to all four institutions. Unofficially, however, this book owes its beginning to work done ten years earlier on Women in American Mu.siciA Bibliography of Music and Literature (1979) compiled and edited by Carol Neuls-Bates and myself. During the book's preparation, Amy Beach's commanding position as America's first successful woman composer of art music became apparent; examination of her music made clear that she was a major American composer. After I did some preliminary research and publishing an article on Beach and her music, three colleagues—Nancy B. Reich, Judith Tick, and Elizabeth Wood, all of whom were writing biographies of women in music—convinced me that a full-scale biography of Beach should be my next project. I am especially grateful for their ongoing encouragement and expert advice. I wish to acknowledge the education in the craft of biography that I have gained from members and presenters of the Biography Seminar at New York University and from Women Writing Women's Lives, a seminar held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Archival research was facilitated greatly by the able genealogist Melinde Lutz Sanborn. To the many librarians and curators whose invaluable assistance often extended beyond the call of duty, I offer my sincere appreciation. Special thanks go to Wayne Shirley and Gillian Anderson of the Music Division of the Library of Congress; Barbara White, Elizabeth Witham, Tim Dodge, and most recently William E. Ross and his staff at the Dimond Library of the University of New Hampshire; Peter Munstedt, formerly at the Library of the University of Missouri in Kansas City; and Jeanne Morrow, head of the Library of the New England

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Conservatory of Music in Boston. The staff of the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, has been generous, accommodating, and endlessly helpful. In addition, I am grateful to the staffs of the Music Research Division and the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the music libraries at Brooklyn College, Hunter College, City College, and the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York; and the Pierpont Morgan Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Metropolitan Opera Archives, the Juilliard School of Music, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, the Chautauqua Institution, and the Sibley Library of the Eastman School of Music. I have been much assisted by librarians at the California Genealogical Society; the California Historical Society; the Sacramento State Library; the Art and Music Department of the San Francisco Public Library; the Music, Bancroft, and General Libraries of the University of California, Berkeley; the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies of the San Jose State University; the Tomas Rivera Library of the University of California, Riverside; the Riverside Municipal Museum; and the San Diego Historical Society. Major assistance came from numerous research organizations and libraries in New Hampshire: the New Hampshire Historical Society, the New Hampshire State Library, the Fuller Public Library of Hillsborough, the Tucker Free Library of Henniker, and the Peterborough Historical Society. I also extend my thanks to the Bagaduce Music Lending Library and Kneisel Hall in Blue Hill, Maine, and to the George and Helen Ladd Library of Bates College. I am grateful for the help of staff members of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, the Countway Medical Library, the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, the Gray Herbarium, the Houghton Library, and the Widener Library, all of Harvard University, as well as the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College. I also thank the librarians and archivists at Boston University Library, at the Library of the New England Conservatory of Music, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Church of the Advent, the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard Musical Association, the Boston Athenaeum, New Bedford Free Public Library the Worcester Historical Museum, the Werner Josten Library at Smith College, and the Centerville Historical Society. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the libraries of the National League of American Pen Women and the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington, D.C.; the public libraries of Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Huntington (California), New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco; the Fleisher Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia; the libraries of the University of Virginia, the University of Washington, the Atlanta Historical Society, and the Georgia Department of Archives and History. Special thanks also are owed to the Marcella Sembrich Memorial Association, Inc. I also express my gratitude to librarians at the Bibliothek der Bayerischen Staatsoper and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; the Musikverlag of B. Schotts Sohne, Mainz; the Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek, Hamburg; and the Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen.

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Special thanks go to those who granted me interviews: first and most important, the late David Buxbaum and his sister, the late Lillian Buxbaum Meredith; also Robert Baker, the late Jeanne Behrend, Shirley A. Bentley, Willa Brigham, Radie Britain, Pearl Morton Bates Brodrick, Jane F. Broughton, Elna Chase, Wallace Dailey, Eugenie Limberg Dengel, Vernon de Tar, Ann P. Duggan, Frances Brockman Farrier, Sally Gallagher, the late Anna Hamlin, Charles N. Henderson, Andreas Holm, Harry Johnson, Dorothy L. Kelley, Geoffrey Levey, Sr., the late Margaret W. McCarthy, Marella MacDill, Norma Mellen, Virginia Duffey Pleasants, Paul Scruton, Carl E. Schroeder, Helen K. Smith, the late Julia Smith, and the late William Strickland. Correspondents who answered my author's query in the New York Times include Vincent de Sola, Sally J. Faria, Marie Therese Fleming, Ann Mathews Holand, Ruth Jeffrey, and Claire M. Warner. My thanks as well to John Baron, Burton Benedict, Cyrilla Barr, Elizabeth Block, Ira F. Brilliant, Betty Buchanan, Wilma Reid Cipolla, Susan C. Cook, Blanche Weisen Cooke, Martha Cox, Richard Crawford, Liane Curtis, Mary Wallace Davidson, Rodney Dennis, J. Michelle Edwards, Wayne Eley, John A. Emerson, Dena Epstein, Virginia Eskin, Brice Farwell, Aloys Fleischmann, Sylvia Glickman, Andrea Goodman, Eric Gordon, Jane Gottlieb, Michael Griffel, Marion Groce, Terry Guptill, Lydia Hailparn, Franz Hajek, Marnie Hall, David Hildebrand, Helga Heim, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Monika Holl, Elizabeth Hostetter, Dorothy Indenbaum, Alfreda Irwin, Carol Jacobson, Walter S. Jenkins, Joy Kestnbaum, Elise K. Kirk, John Koegel, Orly Krasner, Clare Le Corbeiller, Steven Ledbetter, Margery Morgan Lowens, Roberta Lukes, Geoffrey and Mary McGillen, David Margolick, Honor Moore, H. Vincent Moses, Michael Ochs, Carol J. Oja, Natalie Palme, Frank Pendle, Marian Peterson, Leslie Petteys, Joan T. Phipps, Samuel Pogue, Joanne Polk, Percy Preston, Carolyn Rabson, Mary Riley, Angela Robinson, Deane L. Root, Judith Rosen, Wayne Schneider, Mary Scanlan, Doris Schrekengaust, Arnold T. Schwab, Elizabeth Ann Sears, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Catherine P. Smith, Margaret Steger, William K. Tinkham, William Trafka, Judy Tsou, Judith Vander, Channan Willner, and Victor Fell Yellin. I particularly want to express my gratitude to those who have read the completed manuscript, Dena Epstein, Stuart Feder, Nancy B. Reich, Wayne Shirley, Ruth Solie, Joseph N. Straus, and Judith Tick. Others who have given wise counsel include Joseph Bankman, Barbara H. Fried, Linda P. Fried, and Joseph Margolick. To Arthur L. Block, especially, I am grateful for the innumerable ways he has aided this work, including his editorial help and his generous and loving encouragement. Special thanks go to my editors at Oxford University Press, Sheldon Meyer, MaryBeth Branigan, and Maribeth Anderson Payne. Barbara B. Heyman's fine copy-editing has made this a better book. My apologies and grateful thanks go to any who have generously assisted me, but whose names are inadvertently omitted here.

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CONTENTS

7 A Prodigy's New England Upbringing 3 2 The Cheneys and the Marcys 14 j A Prodigy Despite Her Mother 21 4 The Making of a Composer: I 34 5 Two Ways of Looking at a Marriage 42