Composers Datebook

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was born in Henniker, New Hampshire, on today's date in 1867. Amy Beach — or, Mrs. H.H.A. Beach, as she preferred to be called — was one of America's first major female composers and a gifted concert pianist to boot. Ironically, we have Mr. Beach to thank for Amy's decision to devote herself more to composition than performance. In the spring of 1885, at the age of 18, Amy debuted as a soloist with the Boston Symphony, and it seemed a major concert career was in the offing. But later that same year, she married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a prominent New England physician. In respect to his wishes and the custom of the day for women in high society, Mrs. H.H.A. Beach curtailed her concert career and concentrated instead on writing music. Her first published work was a setting of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a long-time family friend. Over the next 35 years, Beach composed a Mass, a Symphony, and this Piano Concerto — plus dozens of smaller works. After her husband's death in 1911, Beach revived her career as a concert pianist with a concert tour throughout Germany, returning to America at the outbreak of World War I. In her later years, she acted as mentor to a whole new generation of American women pursuing careers in music. She died in New York in 1944.