Amy Beach: Poetry and the Piano
Poetry was a major theme in the music of American composer Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867-1944). Her 117 art songs explore a huge range of poets, from Robert Browning to Robert Burns. Amy Beach’s love of poetry also appears in a large catalogue of choral compositions, with settings of poets like Oliver Wendell Holmes, in The Chambered Nautilus, Op. 66, and Francis of Assisi, in The Canticle of the Sun, Op. 123.
Beach’s immersion in poetry went beyond texted music. Poetry also influenced music for the instrument Beach played the most: the piano. In honor of National Poetry Month, we present a selection of piano works by Amy Beach, all inspired by poetry. Beach inscribed the scores of the first six selections with poetic quotations, which we’ve reproduced here for you. In the last two selections, the titles themselves are quotations from one of humanity’s oldest surviving books of poetry, the Book of Psalms.
