Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867–1944) was a musical prodigy whose professional career vacillated between piano performance and composition. Her professional debut was delayed until age sixteen because of parental misgivings, and then her performance career was curtailed at age eighteen when she married a prominent physician, Dr. H. H. A. Beach. His insistence that she devote her energies to composition rather than performance, along with his desire that she remain self-taught, inspired her to develop a unique late-Romantic compositional style. With the support of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its musicians, she produced a Mass with orchestra, a symphony, a concerto, and numerous chamber works. Her trailblazing accomplishments included many firsts for American women composers. After the death of her husband and mother in 1910 and 1911, she reinvented herself as a virtuoso performer while still composing. Her compositional output is widely varied in genre, instrumentation, and musical style.

The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire figured prominently in Amy Beach’s life. Her friendship with the artist colony’s founder, Marian MacDowell, ensured Beach an open invitation; she held eighteen residencies between 1921 and 1941. The colony offered Beach the perfect environment for her creative work: a direct experience of nature and the uninterrupted solitude of a studio of her own amid a community of creative workers. Beach was at the height of her career during these years. She mentored many of the younger women composers who came to work at the colony and composed much of her best music there. Beach became a devoted supporter of the MacDowell Colony. She organized benefit concerts and spoke passionately on its behalf whenever she had the chance. On her death, she left the rights to her music to the colony, a gift that continues to earn income today.

Amy Beach was a prolific composer for the piano and an accomplished concert pianist. This chapter explores her works for solo piano, encompassing her lifespan: from those composed as a young child to her Improvisations, op. 148, written in her late sixties. Beach wrote fluidly for the piano, with her intimate knowledge of the instrument coupled with her secure compositional skills culminating in a fantastic repertoire for piano. Her pieces include simple, pedagogic works; intricate character pieces; works in generic forms; and virtuosic works requiring advanced piano technique. This chapter sets out Beach’s prodigious oeuvre for solo piano chronologically, in the context of Beach’s life, exploring how her personal circumstances symbiotically influenced her compositional output. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of her few pieces for organ, piano duet, and two pianos.