At the Wigmore Hall last Friday, the Takacs String Quartet and Garrick Ohlsson played a piano quintet that was once revered as a masterpiece but then fell out of fashion and wasn’t heard for decades. It’s by Amy Beach, a name which always makes me smile because it looks so incongruous underneath her photograph. ‘Amy Beach’ sounds like an old hippie who sells ethnic tapestries and hogs the limelight at her women-only Seattle book club. But the photos show a Bostonian society hostess straight out of Henry James: unsmiling, with eyes peeled for a social climber who picks up the wrong knife at dinner.
The 21st-century musical establishment portrays Beach (1867–1944) as a prisoner of social convention. At the age of 18 she married a rich 42-year-old doctor who banned her from becoming a concert pianist. He allowed her to compose, but the Brahmin social calendar came first. Yet despite these restrictions she wrote music that was celebrated all over America and also promoted the careers of other women composers.
All of which makes her sound like a musical hybrid of Emily Dickinson and Eleanor Roosevelt; perfect for Radio 3 or the South Bank. Dig deeper, however, and you discover that Mrs H.H.A. Beach — as she was perfectly happy to be known while her husband was alive — wasn’t so much a prisoner of social convention as one of its champions.
She was a Republican, and not a liberal one either. She belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution, whose members traced their (white) ancestry back to the War of Independence. She had, as Joseph Horowitz delicately puts it, ‘misgivings about Jews’. She thought jazz was ‘vulgar’ and ‘debasing’. She composed in the romantic style until the end of her life — and that, rather than prejudice against women composers, explains why demand for her music dried up.
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