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“Bottled Demons”

Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian by Adrienne Fried Block

Oxford University Press Oct 98, 448 pp

By Joseph Horowitz

Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 20, 1998

Teresa Carreno, born in Venezuela in 1853, was a musical prodigy who gave her New York debut recital at the age of nine and proceeded to support her family. By the age of 23, she was divorced and remarried; she eventually married four times. Amy Marcy Cheney, born in New Hampshire in 1867, was a musical prodigy forbidden by her Calvinist mother to touch the piano. Expected to be pious, humble, and modest, she was not encouraged to perform in public. She married once, at the age of 18; her husband was old enough to be her father; there were no offspring. Carreno’s husbands included the and Eugene D’Albert. She complained that their many children made it difficult to practice, and was said to keep a loaded gun on her piano with which to shoot trespassers. Beach’s husband was a physician. She took his name and agreed not to teach or tour; properly, Dr. Henry Beach was sole provider. Carreno and Beach, among the most potent musical women of their day, admired one another. Both composed and played the piano; Carreno also sang, conducted, and ran an opera company. Beach (known as “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach”) dedicated her to Carreno; Carreno (never known as “Madame. D’Albert”) gave the German premiere of Beach’s big Sonata for Violin and Piano. Their very different lives documented differences between Berlin, where D’Albert was a towering artistic presence, and , where Henry Beach belonged to the Brahmin elite, keeping company with the likes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes. A city remarkable for its community of dedicated and influential culture-bearers, late nineteenth century Boston embraced Amy Cheney. Her Boston Orchestra debut, playing Chopin’s F minor Piano Concerto at the age of 17, was a triumph. A month later, she performed Mendelssohn in Boston with the famous Theodore Thomas Orchestra. When, as the 27-year-old Mrs. Beach, she completed her “Gaelic” Symphony, the Boston Symphony premiered it to demonstrative public and journalistic acclaim; Philip Hale, a leading local arbiter, wrote that she had “brought honor to herself and the city which is her dwelling place.” But if Beach was celebrated and supported by Boston, she was also pampered and patronized in ways foreign to Carreno and Berlin. The American fate of Amy Beach was therefore complex, and so were the American “Gilded Age” and “genteel tradition” that buoyed or suppressed her. It was George Santayana, at Harvard, who coined the latter term to deride the sanguine intellectual milieu of turn-of-the-century America, “grandmotherly in that sedate, spectacled wonder with which it www.josephhorowitz.com gazed at this terrible world and said how beautiful and interesting it all was.” But this exaggeration of the truth fails to account for the vigor and promise of concert life in Boston and New York a century ago, when music was deemed “queen of the arts.” Ives, as significant a composer as America has produced, is a product, however aberrant, of the high- toned ideals, preaching uplift and ennoblement, that Santayana ridiculed. Even more centrist , like Beach’s invigorating Boston colleague George Chadwick, could escape, tongue in cheek, from genteel decorum while meaningfully invoking its humanist core. In New York, a world-class Wagner movement both fortified and challenged the meliorism it incongruously absorbed. From these circumstances, more complicated and engrossing than most cultural historians have seen fit to acknowledge, Amy Beach emerges as a figure of special interest – because she was a widely esteemed woman in a field dominated by men; because her natural gift was prodigious; because her artistic development was shaped or misshapen by conditions she helps us to gauge and assess. Adrienne Fried Block, Beach’s leading present-day advocate, subtitles her long- awaited biography “Passionate Victorian” – and so summarizes the tensions within Beach tested by her New England environment. A tiny, pudgy-faced lady, she was earnestly religious, invariably polite. Her rapid speech was punctuated by “delighted little gurgles.” Her politics were Republican. She was utterly conventional in her outward habits and tastes. But the artist within her conveyed a Lisztian libidinal charge. Her impassioned Romanticism set her apart from Chadwick, Paine, , and other more Classically oriented Boston colleagues. And it may also have created needs unfulfilled by her aged husband, childless as well in his previous marriage. What was the outcome? Her mother fitfully capitulated to Amy’s musical vocation, only to seek advice from a man of straunchly conservative outlook: , the Boston Symphony’s Austrian Music Director. Gericke advised that Amy not enroll in a distinguished German conservatory, as had Paine, Chadwick and Parker. Rather she should teach herself to compose by assiduously studying the great masters. Block comments: “Considering that Amy Cheney had been compared with Mozart, Gericke’s recommendation seems especially ill-advised. Chadwick believed her to be the most gifted of the Boston composers and that Gericke was wrong. His advice must be seen in the context of prevailing opinions about women, however – not only in Europe but in this country as well – that intellectually they were less highly evolved than men, and, as result, less able to respond to traning.” And so Amy became a sort of marital trophy – not a pupil, teacher, or touring pianist, but a fulltime composer. This, Dr. Beach reckoned, was her great gift. (Amy, who loved performing, herself once wrote: “I didn’t believe him, for I thought I was a pianist first and foremost.”) Henry backed her to the hilt, both financially and personally. Returning from his medical regime he would daily inquire: “What did you compose today, dear?” If it was a song, he would sing it, and tell her what he thought. Amy would have spent the day in the music room, studying, composing, and practicing. Her self-discipline was tenacious. She assembled an unsurpassed collection of books on theory, composition, and orchestration; if necessary, she translated them; she memorized entire chapters. John Sullivan Dwight, the Boston music critic largely responsible for sacralizing an American repertoire of Germanic classics, believed that without Handel, Mozart, and www.josephhorowitz.com

Beethoven “no man can be quite a man.” He touted the virility of the big forms. And these, of course, were the forms Henry Beach urged on Amy. Three months after her marriage, she undertook what became a 70-minute Mass, completed in 1890. The 40-minute “Gaelic” Symphony came next, followed in 1899 by a 35-minute, four-movement Piano Concerto. She also produced a Violin Sonata and , both of them big- boned and expansive. Duly acclaimed as “heroic,” “virile,” “dignified,” “high-reaching,” and “soulful,” these works made Beach’s reputation as America’s foremost female composer. Boston’s Arthur P. Schmidt promptly published everything she produced. Paine, , and other leading Boston musicians were among her loyalest admirers. Upon hearing the “Gaelic” Symphony Chadwick wrote to her: “I always feel a thrill of pride myself whenever I hear a fine work by any one of us, and as such you will have to be counted in, whether you will or not – one of the boys.” The recent revival of this music, so generously acclaimed a century ago, confirms Beach’s formidable talent: she is, unquestionably, a more remarkable composer than we had assumed. But too much of it sounds overblown or overwrought. For all its authentic intensity, its splendid tunes and incandescent chromatic harmonies, it cannot fully escape the stodginess of the salon. Bottled demons and borrowed clothes pre-empt a sustained personal voice. The training, the travel, the worldliness she was denied all could have channelled her passion more deeply and acutely. The proof came in 1910, when Henry Beach died. Amy, at 42, remained a Victorian, but was liberated from Boston. She travelled to Europe – for the first time! – in 1911. “I have never quite summoned the requisite courage until this year to attempt a voyage across the ocean,” she told a reporter. She discovered that she adored ocean travel. In Munich, she heard Strauss conduct Salome – a work dropped by the Metropolitan Opera in 1907 for offending genteel sensibilities – and wrote: “I was amazed . . . at the beauty of the music . . . Orchestrally it is a glowing mass of beautiful color, like a rich tapestry or stained glass window. The weaving of the motives, with the transcendental beauty of the modulations, was overwhelming.” She hired a European manager and gave recitals. She arranged performances of her symphony, and of her Piano Concerto with herself as soloist. She sometimes triumphed; otherwise, the reviews were mixed – harsher and franker than the feedback Boston’s critics had offered. She returned to the United States fully three years later – and only because of the war. Revitalized, she left Boston for New York, and subsequently lived in California and – mainly – New Hampshire. She returned to Europe frequently. During her long widowhood, Beach was one of the most admired women in America – a model of female accomplishment. Her music was often heard, but marginalized: it lacked the mainstream exponents it had once enjoyed in Boston, New York, and Chicago. By cognoscenti, she was dismissed as old-fashioned. This act of repudiation concealed her continued artistic growth. Though Beach had no appetite for jazz (she called it “vulgar” and “debasing”), for Copland or Prokofiev, her tastes expanded notably. Her recital repertoire, once heavily Germanic, embraced Italian, French, English , and Russian composers. And Beach’s own music – more than 300 works by her death in 1944 – ripened. The heroism dissipated towards a more tempered and distilled style. A composition such as the 22-minute Variations for Flute and String Quartet, from 1916, is music at peace with itself and its place, www.josephhorowitz.com a gorgeous New England idyll arguably more memorable and personal than any of the big works of her youth. More impressive, and much less known, is the one-movement, 15-minute String Quartet Beach completed in 1929. It lay unpublished until 1994, when Adrienne Fried Block edited and annotated it. Based on three Eskimo tunes, it achieves an idiom leaner and more linear, but also more densely chromatic, than Beach’s earlier style. To the ruminative nostalgia of her post-Victorian voice it adds moments of piercing dissonance. Its proportions and development are elegantly gauged. Haunting, elegiac, it may yet become known as one of the most enduring string quartets by an American. (Chadwick’s best quartets deserve comparable consideration and acclaim.) A new recording, by the Lark Quartet, is on the way; others should follow. Judged by its “progressive” style, Beach’s String Quartet might have been composed around 1900 – a starting point rather than a swann song. And yet Beach was complicit in her retardation. Her marriage was apparently happy, and happily ensconced in a circle of significant friends. She was fairly extolled, in the Musical Courier, for her “beautiful womanly nature;” in an article on women and motherhood, Beach herself wrote: “A woman must be a woman first, then a musician.” She joined the Daughters of the American Revolution. She had misgivings about Jews. As Block’s biography stresses, Beach chose the life she led, “a product of her time, her region, her class, her white Anglo-Saxon heritage.” Block’s supportive portraiture is fairminded to a fault. By refusing to villainize Dr. Beach or Boston, she shortchanges the opportunity to highlight Beach’s late output, or to ponder fully the pathos and irony of the saga she unfolds. In a sympathetic 1966 study, The Problem of Boston, the literary critic Martin Green attempted to explain how a city which so humanistically valued and supported its writers could have failed to produce more memorable writing. The problem, he concluded, was that turn-of-the-century Boston treated its writers too well – that they were crippled by an absence of critical distance. While steering clear of Santayana-style stereotypes, he ultimately finds that, for all its exquisite urbanity, vigorous camaraderie, and farsighted democratic cultural philanthropies, literary Boston fatally spurned impolite Romantic self-scrutiny. Amy Beach could have used some of that.