Performer: Joanne Polk

0:00 - Theme: Adagio malincolico
1:38 - I. Più mosso
2:50 - II. Maestoso
4:12 - III. Allegro ma non troppo
5:18 - IV. Andante alla Barcarola
7:18 - V. Largo con molta espressione /Poco più mosso
10:32 - VI. Quasi Fantasia/Allegro all' 'Ongarese
13:12 - VII. Vivace/Valse lento
15:34 - VIII. Con vigore/Lento calmato
17:54 - Marcia funerale
22:58 - Cadenza. Grave/Quasi fantasia/Maestoso come Var.IIdo/Adagio come prima

Liner notes:
Amy Beach (1867-1944) wrote: “How inevitable it was that music should be my life’s work. Both in composition and piano playing, there seemed to be such a strong attraction… that no other life than that of a musician could ever have been possible for me.” Beach’s compositions for piano are products of those powerful dual attractions.

At age sixteen she made her debut in Boston as a concert pianist; within two years she was playing solo with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. A few years later she had an equally stunning breakthrough as a composer with the premiere of her monumental Mass in E-Flat, Op. 5, for vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra. This led to her acceptance as a member of the Second New England School of composers. Beach found further support for her concert career and her compositions from the major performing organizations in Boston who presented her works. Over a lifetime she created over 300 compositions, almost all published and performed in the United States, Europe, and as far away as Australia.

Born Amy Marcy Cheney in the small town of Henniker, New Hampshire, she was brought up in Boston, where at age 18 she married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach. At his request, she agreed to limit her public appearances as a concert pianist to one or two a year and concentrate on composition, a calling her husband considered more appropriate to her new status as a society matron. Increasingly, she introduced her own works on her annual recitals.

In 1904, she created a major and deeply affecting work, Variations on Balkan Themes, Op. 60, that quickly became a staple of her recital repertory. Its composition grew out of an abiding interest in folk music. Although Balkan folk songs were not part of the American musical mainstream, the region was much on the minds of the American public at the time. A recent uprising by Macedonian nationalists had provoked cruel and repressive measures by the ruling Turks.

Beach created the variations out of not one but four themes given to her by a missionary to the Balkans: O Maiko Moyá, Stara Planina, Nasadil ye Dadó (Grandpa has Planted a Little Garden) — a children’s dance song, and a lament entitled Macedonian!.

While the use of more than one theme is unusual for a variation form, the Serbian song, O Maiko Moyá, is the principal theme, and appears in each of the eight variations, in the cadenza, and the coda. Its text, in the translation printed in Beach’s edition, reads:

O my poor country, to thy sons so dear,
Why art thou weeping, why this sadness drear?
Alas! thou raven, messenger of woe,
Over whose fresh grave moanest thou so?

The words refer to the toll in lives taken by the foreign rulers of Serbia some time during their five-century-long domination of what later became part of Yugoslavia.

Beach wrote that she introduced the other melodies for their dramatic effect and to set off the melancholy character of the principal theme. The distinctive elements in these Balkan melodies lend an exotic flavor to almost every variation — the pathos-laden augmented seconds, the changes from minor to major, the alternation of duple and triple meters, and the modal scales on which the melodies are based. Beach however set these exotic melodies to lush late-Romantic harmonies that suggest western rather than eastern Europe, while creating a tragic quality that fits the subject. Beach, once seized by an idea, worked very quickly, in this case completing the variations in eight days. The work is by turns a lament (Theme and Variation 1), a dramatically gestural polonaise (Variation 2), a scherzo (variation 3), a barcarolle (Variation 4), a cantabile variation in the major mode (Variation 5), a fantasy on three of the four themes (Variation 6), a slow bitter-sweet waltz (Variation 7), and a recitative and funeral march that rises to a dramatic climax (Variation 8). These are capped by a Lisztian cadenza in which three of the four themes are recapitulated, ending with the final statement of two themes, O Maiko Mayó and Macedonian!. One of their most effective solo piano works, it is presented here in its original version (a revised edition for solo piano appeared in 1936).

Beach gave the premiere while the variations were still in manuscript, on 8 February 1905 at a piano recital at Huntington Chambers Hall in Boston. The reviewer for the Boston Evening Transcript was impressed, stating that from the four themes “Mrs. Beach has developed a series of compositions marked by deep feeling and great variety and richness.”