John Gfroerer, a documentary filmmaker based in Concord, has brought New Hampshire’s stories to the screen for years. He’s especially passionate about his next film, which dives into the life and work of composer and pianist Amy Beach.
Born in West Henniker in 1867 as Amy Marcy Cheney, she went on to become the first American woman to find major success as a composer. At the age of 17, she played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Eleven years later, the orchestra performed her Gaelic Symphony, the first published symphonic work written by a woman.
“I love music, and to be able to produce a documentary about a composer is like a dream,” he said.
The film, In the Key of Green: The Genius of Amy Beach, is set to be finished in the fall of 2020.
A longtime admirer of music and Beach’s work, Gfroerer is collaborating with Virginia Eskin, a renowned solo pianist and adjunct professor of music at Keene State.
The two met at a screening of Gfroerer’s 2014 film Powerful as the Truth in Keene, which told the story of longtime Union Leader publisher William Loeb.
Gfroerer said Eskin brought up the idea to make a film about Beach. They stayed in touch and met a few times over the following years. It was about a year and a half ago, Gfroerer said, that “we got serious about it.”
They began fundraising for the project, pitching the idea to various donors. New Hampshire Humanities and the Putnam Foundation agreed to back the project, as well as several individual donors.
Production began earlier this year. Beach’s story is told through interviews with Eskin and other experts in music and its history.
“I was stunned by the amount of music she had composed,” Eskin says in the film’s trailer of the time she was introduced to Beach’s work. “One-hundred-and-fifty songs, chamber music, hymns, piano music, an enormous amount of choral music, a symphony, an opera. She hits on all the levels, and she becomes then our most successful and famous woman composer, bar none.”
Beach showed early signs of being a musical prodigy. She created her first piece of music at the age of 4, called “Mama’s Waltz.” Too young to write the music on paper herself, Beach dictated the notes to her mother, Gfroerer said.
“It was in her head, she hadn’t played it,” he said.
Her father, Charles Cheney, worked at the family’s paper mill that sat along the Contoocook River in Henniker, according to a biography of Beach written by Adrienne Fried Block.
The mill burned down when Beach was 2 years old in 1869, and the family moved to Boston where Cheney found a job as a paper stock salesman. Beach got her first keyboard when she was 4, according to Block, and her life as a performing musician and composer began.
After finding success performing with the Boston Symphony as a teenager, Beach married a prominent Boston doctor when she was 18. But Dr. Harrison H.A. Beach did not want Amy to be a concert pianist.
He encouraged her to compose, though he kept her from studying composition in Europe, where the greatest composers of the time, all of whom were men, had gone to finish their training.
Social constructs did not keep Beach from rising to the levels of those classically trained composers. She was mostly self-taught, and as her profile grew, Beach came to represent women’s progress in the Unites States in the early years of the 1900s.
“She lived in a society in which she was upheld to some very conservative standards in Boston,” says Sarah Gerk, a professor of musicology at Binghamton University in New York who is featured in the film. “She was valued in newspapers and in magazines as somebody who was a symbol of women’s progress at the time, but she herself didn’t speak very openly about it and didn’t take part in that.”
Beach returned to performing as a concert pianist after her husband’s death in 1910 and went on to tour the U.S. and Europe. Royalties from her work went to support the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, where she spent several summers writing music, according to the film.
Gfroerer and Eskin’s film describes Beach as a “symbol of the creative power of women.”
A collection of Beach’s material is kept at the University of New Hampshire library in Durham. It was started from Eskin’s collection, who Gfroerer said started the “rediscovery of Beach” in the 1970s.
The film is set to be completed in the fall of 2020. Those interested in supporting the project can visit Gfroerer’s company website at accompanyvideo.com.
(Nick Stoico can be reached at 369-3321, nstoico@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @NickStoico.)