Duration: 9 minutes

Description: Amy Beach (1867–1944) composed Three Songs, Op. 78 in 1917, during the period following her return to the United States after three years of performing and promoting her music in Europe; the set comprises 1. Meadowlarks, to a poem by Ina Donna Coolbrith; 2. Night Song at Amalfi, to words by Sara Teasdale; and 3. In Blossom Time, again to Coolbrith, and was published in 1917. Beach had returned from Europe shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and thereafter resumed an active American career as pianist and composer, and these songs belong to a mature period in which her extensive experience with the German Romantic Lied was increasingly joined by a distinctly American choice of contemporary poets and imagery. The three songs display Beach’s characteristic sensitivity to poetry: Meadowlarks responds to Coolbrith’s exuberant celebration of spring with flexible modified-strophic writing; Night Song at Amalfi turns to Teasdale’s atmospheric nocturnal imagery; and In Blossom Time returns to the imagery of nature and renewal, with the piano functioning throughout as an expressive partner rather than merely an accompaniment. Modern analytical scholarship has singled out Meadowlarks and In Blossom Time as particularly clear examples of Beach’s sophisticated modification of rounded-binary and strophic procedures, techniques related to the German song tradition she inherited, especially that of Brahms. Today, Three Songs, Op. 78 is not among Beach’s most frequently encountered works, but it occupies a respected place within her substantial output of more than one hundred art songs and has benefited from the broader modern revival of her music; the set is particularly valuable as an example of the refined text setting, formal subtlety, and late-Romantic harmonic language that have led performers and scholars to reassess Beach as one of the most important American song composers of her generation. Reprint edition.

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