188 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
United States, she established a new home base in Hillsborough, New Hampshire.
Beginning in 1930 she made New York City her winter home. W hen Beach died in
New York in 1944, she left behind more than three hundred compositions and a
record of pioneering achievements, as both a performer and a composer: she was
the fi rst American-trained concert pianist, part of the fi rst generation of profes-
sional American female instrumentalists, and the fi rst American woman to com-
pose large-scale works for the concert hall. She was also one of the fi rst composers,
male or female, to use folk melodies to help create a distinctively American style.
Although women had taken an active part in America’s music making dur-
ing the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most led their musical lives
within severe limits. If Beach’s generation was the fi rst to produce professional
women instrumentalists, that was because singers had previously been the
only women encouraged to develop their skills to that level. If Beach was the
fi rst American-trained concert pianist, that was because the parents of talented
males like Gottschalk sent their sons to Europe for their musical training. And if
she was the fi rst American woman to compose successfully in large-scale forms,
that was because the men who controlled such opportunities had resisted the
idea that a female composer could meet the demands of the symphony, concerto,
oratorio, or opera—genres seldom approached by the few widely known female
European composers, such as Clara Schumann.
“Can a woman become a great composer?” asked Louis Elson, Boston critic
and member of the New England Conservatory’s faculty, in his History of American
Music (1904). “Will there ever be a female Beethoven or a Mozart?” In Europe,
Elson reported, these questions had been answered “quickly and in the nega-
tive.” Yet he doubted that men’s capacities in music were superior to women’s.
“We venture to believe,” he wrote, “that it has been insuffi cient musical educa-
tion and male prejudice that have prevented female composers from compet-
ing with their male brethren in art.” His evidence was the career of Amy Beach,
which he had followed fi rsthand. As a child with extraordinary talent,
she had shown the energ y, confi dence, and character to acquire profes-
sional skills that made her a peer of male colleagues. Thus Beach served in
her own day as a symbol of what a woman musician could do if given the
chance. Well known and tireless as both a composer and a performer, she set
an example for other American women to take their talent seriously.
In later years Beach wrote music chiefl y for the kinds of programs in
which she herself performed. Yet large-scale works fi rst distinguished her
from her female predecessors, who by the 1890s had already composed
many songs and piano pieces. Most of these works, including the Mass in
E-fl at (1892), the Gaelic Symphony (1896), and the Piano Concerto (1900),
were written before Beach was thirty-fi ve, a period coinciding with the
Boston group’s heyday. The Handel and Haydn Society premiered the
mass, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra introduced the symphony and
the concerto.
Looking back in 1917 on her Gaelic Symphony, Beach explained in a pro-
gram note that the symphony’s melodies “sprang from the common joys,
sorrows, adventures and struggles of a primitive people. The simple, rugged
and unpretentious beauty led me to ‘take my pen in hand’ and try to develop
their ideas in symphonic form.” These comments point to a fact unknown
to the public when the symphony was premiered. Inspired by the BohemianK This program of the Handel
and Haydn Society of Boston
places Amy Beach, composer of a
new Mass in E-fl at (1892), in the
company of the European masters.music careers for
women172028_08_183-204_r3_ko.indd 188 23/01/13 10:24 AM