Piano Quintet in f-sharp minor, Op. 67

Composer: BEACH, Amy Marcy Cheney
  • Beach composed this quintet in 1907.1 The manuscript is dated Dec. 14, 1907. 
  • The work premiered on February 27, 1908, in Boston’s Potter Hall. Amy Beach appeared as pianist with the Hoffmann Quartet.2
  • This work was published in Boston in 1909.3
  • This work is influenced by Brahms’s Piano Quintet in f minor, Op. 34, which Beach performed with the Kneisel Quartet in 1900. Beach dialogues with Brahms in her Piano Quintet by quoting and adapting the second theme of the final movement of Brahms’s quintet in each movement of hers.4
    • Brahms also uses thematic transformation as a structural practice throughout his Quintet:5 so Beach is dialoguing both with Brahms’s theme and with his structural technique.
  • Beach performed her Piano Quintet many times during a 1916-1917 concert tour with the Kneisel Quartet.6

Sources

  1. Adrienne Fried Block and E. Douglas Bomberger, “Beach [Cheney], Amy Marcy,” Grove Music Online (October 16, 2013), accessed March 25, 2022, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-1002248268. 
  2. Adrienne Fried Block, Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer 1867-1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 127.
  3. Mrs. H.H.A. Beach, Quintet in F sharp minor for Pianoforte, Two Violins, Viola and Violoncello (Boston: Arthur P. Schmidt, 1909).
  4. Block, Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian, 127.
  5. George S. Bozarth and Walter Frisch, “Brahms, Johannes,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed March 25, 2022, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000051879.
  6. Ibid., 129.

Cut IDs

24515 48917 48924