Page 21 - Phil 25-26 opening night DIGITAL program book

Program Notes

and Moscheles’ third Piano Concerto), and soloed twice with the Boston
Symphony Orchestra at age eighteen in Chopin’s F Major Concerto for
Piano and Mendelssohn’s D minor Piano Concerto.
As a member of a Republican family, she was enrolled in the
Daughters of the American Revolution, and married at eighteen to a
prominent Bostonian, Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach: at his request
(he was twenty-five years older than she), Amy shifted her focus to
composition from full-time performance. She was financially secure,
backed artistically by Dr. Beach, and was therefore one of the first
American women to publish many symphonic works. Some details of the
conditions her father agreed to on her behalf to secure the marriage to
Dr. Beach: “to live according to his status,” “function as a patron of the
arts,” to “not teach,” to perform no more than two public (charitable)
recitals a year, to not continue her lessons in composition at Wellesley,
and to not “study with any educator or colleague of the arts.”

Fluent in French and German, she translated, wrote, composed, and
continued to practice regularly at home. While her husband sang with
two of Boston’s amateur choral groups, she began to be recognized
as one of the great American composers of her time. Boston’s Handel
and Haydn Society premiered her monumental romantic Grand Mass in
E-flat in 1892, and she was the first female composer presented by the
Symphony Society of New York (the German concert aria Eilende Wolken,
op. 18).
Beach’s elegant waltz, Bal masqué, was published by Arthur Schmidt
as her op. 22 in Boston in 1894: the archives of that company are
held by the Library of Congress, which has digitized the only surviving
manuscript copy of the original piano version. The Boston Symphony
was the first American orchestra to champion a female composer,
premiering her orchestral version of Bal masque (on a June 13, 1895
“Promenade” concert).
Bal masqué is youthful music (imagine the twenty-five-year-old
composer at her piano, dreaming of future concerts), contemporaneous
with the last Viennese waltzes of Johann Strauss II (note her use of
harp and divided strings throughout) and John Philip Sousa’s Liberty
Bell March (think Monty Pynthon). This is also public music, suitable for
Boston society balls and bandstands, in the three-strain ensemble form
preferred by Sousa for his marches and waltzes.
Amy’s favorite parlor song by Sousa was the hilarious “You’ll Miss Lots
of Fun When You’re Married” (1890), which she only played for other

Season 2025/26
S eason 20 25/26 ~ 19
~ 19