Overcoming society’s strictures, Amy Beach became the first successful woman composer in America, “the most performed composer of her generation.” Her formidable talents were recognized at an early age and developed in serious piano study with the best teachers in Boston. Her parents allowed her to make her debut at age 16 and to solo with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at 18, but they opposed a professional career. That viewpoint was reinforced by Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, an older, prominent physician and amateur musician, whom she married in 1885.Reluctantly, she agreed to limit her public performances and, with his encouragement, turned her efforts to composing. Yet she was denied a teacher (deemed unnecessary for women who supposedly composed by feeling rather than intellect) and learned composition by independent study of European treatises and music. She was, however, allowed to publish her works under her new name, Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. After her husband’s death in 1910, she went to Europe as simply Amy Beach to revive a concert career and promote her compositions. She returned triumphantly to Boston in 1914 and devoted herself to concert tours, composing, and championing women composers. When she died in 1944 in New York City, almost all of her 300-plus works, encompassing all genres, had been published and performed.

Beach premiered her only Piano Quintet in 1909. Critics found it “truly modern” and “distinctly rhapsodic … in the fashion of our time.” They also politely suggested that the piano sometimes overwhelmed the strings. (She was, after all, showcasing herself!) The equality of the parts indeed is undermined by so much unison string playing against the piano’s Liszt-like figurations and powerful octaves and tremolos, as heard, for example, in the opening and closing of the work. But throughout, thematic material is distributed, rather soloistically, to all players. In the first movement, after the slow introduction, the first violin presents the first, Brahms-tinted theme and the piano the second in sonata form with development and recapitulation. The strings in the second movement, in ternary form, have more independence, both in introducing and sharing the melodic material. After a lengthy, if fast, introduction, the last movement’s first theme is presented by the violin and the second theme, more slowly, by the viola. There is even a brief fugal treatment of the first theme before the return of the Adagio introduction of the first movement. Typical of Beach’s style, all movements have distinct sections and frequent changes in meter, tempos, and keys. The mercurially chromatic harmonies suggest another Lisztian influence.