Del Sol Featured Composer-
Amy Marcy Beach (1867-1944)

Amy Marcy Beach
Born Amy Marcy Cheney in Henniker, NH. in 1867, Mrs. H.H. Beach, as she styled herself after her marriage to a prominent physician in 1885, became the first woman composer to achieve wide recognition in America. A child prodigy on the piano, she made her Boston concert debut at age sixteen. Within two years she had performed Chopin's F MINOR CONCERTO FOR PIANO AND ORCHESTRA with the Boston Symphony and had begun to tour widely as a soloist. After marriage to Dr. Beach, however, she curtailed her concertizing in favor of homemaking. It was during this period until her husband's death in 1910 that Mrs. Beach first began to compose. Her FESTIVAL JUBILATE, written for the dedication of the Women's Building at Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1892, won recognition for her as a serious composer in the Romantic genre. She followed this success with a GAELIC SYMPHONY, performed by the Boston Symphony in 1896, and her PIANO CONCERTO IN C-SHARP minor in 1899, which she herself premiered with the same orchestra. As a widow, Mrs. Beach resumed her concertizing in America and Germany and increased her compositional output. In addition to her piano music and large scale orchestral works, she created more than 150 songs, almost all in the grand, operatic, heart-on-sleeve vein of the late 19th century. Settings like AH, LOVE, BUT A DAY! and THE YEAR'S AT THE SPRING became staples of the early 20th century concert repertory.