Picture in your mind a glorious summer evening. When the church bell announces the commencement of nautical twilight…STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING…Listen carefully! If the air is right, you will hear the hills come alive with the sound of music.
A distant piano’s notes, in arabesque, has come to tickle the leaves on the trees and jiggle your inner ear bones.
Miss Amy Marcy Beach is playing her piano for her beloved hometown of Henniker.
In 1833, Amy Marcy Beach was just 16 years old, a piano prodigy and performed with The Boston Symphony. She played Beethoven’s Concerto #3, that contained a cadenza that she herself had devised.
In 1896, her Gaelic Symphony was premiered by the Boston Symphony. It was, “The first symphony composed and published by an American woman.”
She was born on September 5, 1867 in Henniker New Hampshire, and at the age of four she composed three waltzes for piano while summering on her grandfather’s farm in West Henniker. Having no piano available, she composed them in her head and played them upon her return home in the fall.
Her father was Charles Abbott Cheney, the nephew of Bates College Founder Oren B. Cheney.
Her career was monumental!!! She played her piano all over the world. You can find details almost anywhere on the internet.
She called Hillsboro, New Hampshire home for much of her life.
News accounts from the day, tell us heart disease led to Beach’s retirement in 1940, around the time of which she was honored at a testimonial dinner by 200 of her friends in New York. Beach died in New York City in 1944.
Amy Cheney Beach is buried with her husband in the Forest Hills Cemetery in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.
OHB, keeping it real…you can be the judge…