Beach: String Quartet, Opp.79/89 (1921/29)
Grave – Allegro molto – Grave
At some point during our initial five-week sojourn in the US (Sept/Oct 1978), we members of the Fitzwilliam Quartet were introduced to the music of “Mrs H.H.A. Beach”. Who would not have been intrigued – or even amused! – by the somewhat eccentric formality of this composer’s name? In 1885, she had married a Harvard professor and physician, Dr Henry Harris Aubrey Beach – fully 24 years older than herself; thereafter retaining his name professionally (other than in Europe), even beyond his death in 1910. Amy Cheney was born in New Hampshire, and from the age of four displayed clear signs of being a child prodigy – both as composer and pianist. Two years later she began formal piano lessons with her somewhat controlling mother, and was soon performing her own little pieces in public. However, her official debut didn’t take place for another ten years, as a result of which she was invited to play with the Boston Symphony in 1885 – the year of her marriage, by which time she was required by her husband to limit her musical activities to composition only. During the 1890s, she achieved two major successes, with a Mass in E flat and her Gaelic Symphony – the first to have been composed by an American woman. Such was the latter’s success that she was invited to join a group of older, male composers known as the “Second New England School”, which included Edward MacDowell and Arthur Foote – a composer also well known to the Fitzwilliam.
Having moved to Europe after Henry’s death, she eventually resumed playing – Beethoven and Brahms, as well as her own songs and chamber works. Among the latter, was a piano quintet which, on her return to America in 1914, she played with a number of established groups but particularly with the Kneisel Quartet (famously and wittily disparaged by Charles Ives as “nice”!). This as a result of having earlier performed together the quintets by Schumann and Brahms – their influence can be felt in her own quintet, but not so in her string quartet “in one movement”: here, we find a level of chromaticism and dissonance – particularly in its Grave opening section – which surprised some commentators, familiar as they were with the lusher Romanticism of her earlier works. Needless to say, much had changed over those heady couple of decades in western musical history, and the time spent in the hotbeds of Europe could hardly fail to have made a profound impression on her enquiring mind. Although work on the quartet was begun in 1921, in her native New Hampshire – possibly with the intention of submitting it for the 1922 Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge chamber music competition – she did not achieve its final form for another eight years, while wintering in Rome. On her return home it soon received its first performance at the American Academy in April 1929 and was heard a number of times over the next few years. Perhaps the most significant of these took place in New York in 1931; Beach had been a founder and first president of the Society of American Women Composers, who duly honoured her by promoting her new quartet. It also featured in a 75th birthday festival at the Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington DC, in November 1942. By then she was recognised as one of the foremost American composers, as well as a pioneering teacher and educationalist.
In addition to its new found modernistic stance – cast in a single three-part arch form – the quartet incorporates three native Inouit melodies, the first of which – “Summer Song” – is hauntingly announced by the solo viola, quickly joined by the rest of the quartet for “Playing at Ball”. The third of these quotations from Franz Boas’ study of the Alaskan Inuit tribes – “Itataujang’s Song” – is reserved for the scherzo-like central section, where it is eventually transformed into a brilliantly accomplished and fully worked out fugue, before a return to the opening music.
Alan George
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