A “Veritable Autobiography”? Amy Beach's Piano Concerto in C-sharp Minor, op. 45

Abstract

On 7 April 1900, Amy Beach, then thirty-two years old, gave the first performance of her Concerto in C-sharp Minor for Piano and Orchestra, op. 45, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 1 She had begun it in 1897 a few months after the same orchestra gave the premiere of her Symphony in E Minor (Gaelic), op. 32.2 Interest in her as a composer was so high that Wilhelm Gericke, conductor of the Boston Symphony, engaged her to play the premiere of the concerto before she had completed its composition.3 The dedication to the great pianist Teresa Carrefio indicates her hope that the concerto would be given by other pianists as well.4 However, her main object was to present herself simultaneously as a composer of an important composition with orchestra as well as a virtuoso concert pianist, the latter a role she would have chosen had she been free to do so. There is considerable evidence, some of it circumstantial and suggestive, that the subject of the concerto is the reciprocal relationship between Beach's life and work. Beach herself made that connection in a general way: [A] composer might remain apparently