The expanding professional opportunities available to women in fin de siècle Britain and America made possible Helen Hopekirk’s remarkable threefold career as pianist, composer and piano pedagogue. Her life comprised two periods differentiated by contrasting priorities and neatly separated by four years of teaching at New England Conservatory from 1897-1901. Before 1897 Hopekirk studied with prominent European teachers, toured widely as a piano virtuoso and composed in genres ranging from art song to sonata and concerto; after 1901 she taught profusely, performed less regularly, and chose intriguing paths for her concert repertory and composition.

Early Training and Conservatory Education

Helen Hopekirk was born 20 May 1856 in Portobello, a suburb of Edinburgh known for its brick and tile industry and its recreational beach on the Firth of Forth.  She was the second of eight children of Helen Croall and Adam Hopekirk, a printer, bookseller and piano retailer.  Her earliest musical experiences were popular Scottish songs and psalmody of the Free Church of Scotland, and her first piano lessons were with Miss Stone, governess of Windsor Lodge Academy, where she performed in public for the first time at age twelve.

Hopekirk later attended the Edinburgh Institution for the Education of Young Ladies, taking piano instruction under Hungarian pianist George Lichtenstein and studying music theory with Alexander Campbell MacKenzie.  She appeared as soloist with the Edinburgh Amateur Orchestra Society in three consecutive seasons.  In April 1874 The Scotsman lauded “her clear articulation, command of the instrument, and power of expression” in Mendelssohn’s G Minor Concerto, the finale of which she performed “with a union of speed and clearness that delighted as well as astonished.”

Fulfilling her father’s dying wish, Hopekirk continued her musical education at the Leipzig Konservatorium, where she studied piano with Louis Maas, theory with Salomon Jadassohn, and composition with Ernst Friedrich Richter from 1876-1878.  Her classmates included conductor Karl Muck and composers Ethel Smyth, Eduard Schütt and George W. Chadwick.  With classes segregated by gender, the Konservatorium provided less vigorous training in theory and composition to women than to men, a curricular imbalance which reflected not only the stronger academic backgrounds of entering male students but the faculty’s low estimation of female intellect as well.  Hopekirk admitted that while a student at Leipzig she worked at counterpoint and composition in a “very desultory way.”

Focused on late Classical to mid-Romantic Period works, her piano repertory over the two years amounted to a steady diet of works by Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, Raff, Grieg, von Holstein, and Konservatorium faculty.  Beethoven’s Rondo in G Major (1798) was the earliest work she studied and Brahms’ Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel (1861) the most modern and ambitious.  Rebelling against Leipzig’s dismissive view of Franz Liszt, Hopekirk claimed to be “at the height of her Liszt fever” during her student years.  Like many other Konservatorium pianists, she hoped to study with him some day and regretted that his years of transcendental execution were over.  In an interview for the Boston Post in 1907, she reminisced about her starstruck encounter with her idol in early spring 1878: “I met him face to face—this man of whom all Europe was talking, and whose compositions I admired with frantic admiration. . . .  I stopped short, breathless.  Presently, however, I found my voice, and on my mentioning [my teacher] Lichtenstein, who was an old friend of Liszt, he showed the utmost cordiality [and] invited me to come and talk with him, setting off at once.”

For her final examination at the Konservatorium in 1878, Hopekirk played Saint-Saëns’ G Minor Concerto with the student orchestra under Carl Reinecke.  The performance created a furore during which Hopekirk had to return to the stage four times. “The young woman played the first movement with virtuoso verve and strength, the second with grace, and the third with joyous impact,” reported the Musikalisches Wochenblatt.  At Reinecke’s invitation, she returned for her professional debut at the Gewandhaus six months later in Chopin’s F Minor Concerto and the “Larghetto” movement of Adolf von Henselt’s F Minor Concerto, for which she received a gold bracelet and admiring press notices back in Great Britain.  Her final encomium from Leipzig was the 1879 Helbig Prize for outstanding student achievement.

Building a Performance Career

Returning to London in 1879, Hopekirk played Saint-Saëns’ concerto for her debut at the Crystal Palace under August Manns.  “Her success was as decided as it was well deserved,” declared the London Times. “She played the final Tarantella at a pace and with a rhythmical decision at which Rubinstein himself need not have been ashamed.”  Over the next three years she appeared as soloist under Manns in seven additional performances, including six at the Crystal Palace, and with Charles Hallé’s orchestra in Manchester.

Over time Hopekirk became acquainted with many distinguished musicians.  Clara Schumann invited Hopekirk to sit beside her when she practiced at Broadwood’s piano showroom.  At the home of music publisher George Augener, Hopekirk met Edvard Grieg and Xaver Scharwenka, who was an eager four-hand piano partner and “one of the most entertaining of men.” Scharwenka’s electrifying Staccato Étude appeared on seventeen of Hopekirk’s recitals in the London area.

In 1881 Hopekirk played for Anton Rubinstein, the pianist whose artistry put her “under a spell” through “the magic of [his] great, noble individuality.”  “I wore a black lace hat [embellished with flowers],” she recalled in her memoirs.  “He stooped as if to feel their fragrance but discovered they were artificial, and said, ‘Tragen Sie nie falsche Blumen, mein Kind.’ [‘Never wear false flowers, my child.’]  Then taking two beautiful ones out of a bowl on his table, he cut my poor make-believes out of my hat, pinning his real ones carefully in the same place.”  After she played, Rubinstein’s “brava” and praise for her “Feuer, Energie, Kraft, und musikalisches Gefühl” [“fire, energy, strength and musical feeling”] sustained Hopekirk in her career ambitions for years to come.

Marriage and a Burgeoning Concert Schedule

Hopekirk married William A. Wilson, partner in the Edinburgh rope and twine manufacturing firm of Lees & Wilson, on 4 August 1882.  A lifelong avocational painter and writer, Wilson reduced his business responsibilities in order to manage his wife’s concert career.  Wishing to establish a more distinctive persona for Hopekirk, Wilson endorsed “Madame Helen Hopekirk” as her new professional moniker.   He tailored her programs to suit the differing tastes of metropolitan and provincial audiences and capitalized on her prodigious memory by booking large numbers of appearances in small geographical areas and short periods of time.  Wilson also documented Hopekirk’s career by preserving programs and reviews in bulky scrapbooks, chronologizing each concert with a designated number “after marriage.”

Wilson scheduled several arduous tours of England and Scotland in preparation for Hopekirk’s first visit to the United States.  One set of concerts consisted of thirteen appearances in the twenty-seven days between 12 October and 7 November 1883.  Hopekirk exceeded audience expectations by playing programs entirely from memory, prompting the Aberdeen Journal to remark that her playing “without score, suggests the charm of impromptu inspiration throughout.”  Critics praised her premiere performances of Schumann’s G Minor Sonata in Edinburgh and Glasgow, agreeing that the mercurial character of his music suited Hopekirk particularly well.   Her last recital in Scotland at the Edinburgh Literary Institute consisted entirely of works by composers then living, including her friends and teachers Jadassohn, Rubinstein, Grieg and Scharwenka.

Three-Season American Tour

For her American debut in December 1883, Hopekirk played her well-seasoned “Saint-Saens Second” with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  Reviews of her performance typified the critical preoccupation with gender that she and other female performers would encounter for decades.  Writing for the Boston Evening Transcript, William Foster Apthorp conceded that Hopekirk had played uncharacteristically well for a woman:  “. . . she shows, in her playing, something which we are firmly persuaded women must possess, but which our experience had almost made us despair of a woman showing in pianoforte-playing namely; BRAINS!”  In this and many future reviews, writers applied their personal criteria to Hopekirk’s playing, assigning desirable and/or undesirable qualities to that which they perceived as her “masculine” and “feminine” sides.  As demonstrated by a series of reviews in New York appearing between late December 1883 and early January 1884, one New York Tribune review found that her masculine, objective side produced “earnest” performances with “serious-mindedness and lofty aims”, while a writer for the Brooklyn Times chided her for trying to “display manliness in Chopin’s music” when there was none.  At best her feminine side radiated “sweetness” and “tenderness” [New York Times] and at worst “limitation” and “fancy,” i.e., a lack of gravity “usually overlooked . . . in a woman.” [Tribune]

Hopekirk presented recital series in New York (Steinway Hall), Brooklyn and points south and west during her first two seasons in the United States (1883-1885).  Having committed to memory nearly 130 long and short solo works (a repertory larger than that of any other pianist save Rubinstein, according to the Boston Evening Traveller), she played as many as four different programs in a single city in as few as twelve days.  Her recitals included nine sonatas by Beethoven, of which Appassionata was the overwhelming favorite; thirty-six pieces by Chopin; copious Schumann, with Études Symphoniques, Carnaval, Waldscenen and the C Major Fantasy leading her list of repeat performances; and eighteen Liszt transcriptions of works by Bach, Chopin, Gluck, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Wagner.  She found her most receptive audiences in Brooklyn, where a reviewer for the Brooklyn Eagle declared her “a complete master of technique” whose playing reveals “strong intellectuality” and “poetic imagination.” 

After living in New York hotels for eighteen months, Hopekirk and Wilson settled into more attractive accommodations in Boston, 1885.  Hopekirk told a young pianist admirer that she felt “very disloyal to New York” but “liked Boston much the best” for its population rich in musicians and literary figures.  Hopekirk and Wilson met authors Mary Mapes Dodge and Louise Chandler Moulton who, in turn, introduced them to William Dean Howells, Charles Dudley and Susan Lee Warner, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.  The nearly blind, fatherly Holmes took particular pleasure at hearing Hopekirk play private recitals for him in his Boston home.

During the three seasons of her first American tour, Hopekirk performed 63 solo and chamber programs in Boston, New York, Brooklyn, Newark, Washington, Buffalo, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Montreal, and at Wellesley, Wells, and Oberlin Colleges. She appeared with orchestras in Boston, Philadelphia, Brooklyn and Cincinnati.  Nine well-attended recitals in the Chicago area near the end of her tour were regarded as having done “more for the musical taste than any recitals previously given in Chicago.”  The Chicago Tribune praised her “refined, intelligent, and sympathetic playing, accompanied by almost a total concealment of technical difficulties.”  Nevertheless, other reviews in Chicago citing a "want of finish" in her passage work and a focus more on "essential effect" than on details of "linear beauty" may have foretold her own desire to develop firmer tone and greater technical security in her playing.

Pianistic Refinement and Focus on Composition

As the American tour drew to a close, Hopekirk decided to seek more training in piano and composition.  Recalling their chance meeting in Leipzig, Hopekirk’s first choice of instructor was Franz Liszt.  Letter of introduction in hand, she was at a railroad station on her way to meet him at the Bayreuth Festival when she read of his death on 31 July 1886.  Within a few months she turned her sights to the Vienna studio of Theodor Leschetizky, who became the greatest influence on her playing and teaching. 

Although a few of her short piano pieces had been published in New York and Edinburgh in the early 1880’s, Hopekirk did not study composition seriously until she and Wilson moved to Vienna in March 1887.  Leschetizky referred her to Karel Navràtil, under whom she completed two sonatas for violin and piano and at least fifteen lieder.  Her work with Navràtil led to a long-term pattern of allocating extended summers to composing and the balance of the year to performing and teaching.  In the summers of 1889 and 1890, for example, Hopekirk lived and composed in Hallstatt, Austria, just 12 miles south of Leschetizky’s summer house in Bad Ischl.

Performer/Composer - Second American Tour

Hopekirk embarked on a second American tour in 1891-1892, unaccompanied by Wilson.  Her first appearance in January 1891 was as soloist with Arthur Nikisch and the Boston Symphony in Tschaikovsky’s B-flat Minor Concerto.  Philip Hale spoke of her “remarkable individuality” in the Boston Herald.  “She overcame the great technical difficulties with ease, and . . .  gave a broadly conceived and carefully finished performance.”  Shortly thereafter she had the opportunity to play the concerto for Tchaikovsky in his New York hotel room.

Two months later, Hopekirk achieved a milestone in her career as a composer, performing the premiere of her Sonata in E Minor for Pianoforte and Violin with Boston Symphony concertmaster Franz Kneisel in Union Hall.  The sonata was the first of her works to be heard in a prestigious venue and to receive extensive press coverage, including notices in twelve Boston newspapers.  Reviewers admired the “fresh, brilliant and difficult” writing of the work’s first movement, the “Scottish quality” of the second, and the “fiery rondo” that served as the third.  In composing such a substantial work, Hopekirk had hurdled the convention that women musicians should restrict themselves to writing—at most—short pieces for home consumption. As the Boston Post mansplained, “Woman has until late years been of influence in music through charm of voice and witchery of finger-play; not through original musical thought expressed in writing.”  The Boston Times grudgingly noted that “Mrs. Hopekirk’s sonata is a creditable piece of music, limited . . . by the composer’s inherent deficiency of created means, yet in an academic sense of the term it is scholarly and well made.”  A marginally more welcoming Boston Home Journal described the themes of Hopekirk’s first movement as “well shaped and well contrasted,” but then could not resist a condescending androcentric analysis:

as might be expected . . . the logical development of the themes cannot be highly praised.  Women arrive at their opinions more by leaps of inspiration than by cool reasoning; and in their musical compositions they seem unable to carry out their thoughts to a fixed conclusion by the laws of counterpoint. 

Whether these assessments were fair or biased, Hopekirk felt that her sonata had been dissected by Boston critics to a higher degree than a male composer’s work would have been.  She wished to be judged objectively as composer and pianist, with “a fair field and no favor” for men or women. 

Paris Years and Focus on Composing

Hopekirk rejoined Wilson in Vienna in May 1892, determined to relinquish, at least temporarily, the nomadic life of a performer.  The following autumn they settled in Paris, where Hopekirk devoted three years to further composition study under Richard Mandl.  Concentrating primarily on orchestration technique, she completed a single-movement Concertstück in D Minor and a three-movement Concerto in D Major for piano and orchestra, six shorter works for orchestra without soloist and around twenty lieder.  In Paris Hopekirk acquired more piano students than at any time in the past, giving lessons to an assemblage of Norwegian, American, Scottish, and English pupils.  Her most prominent student was Clara Clemens, Mark Twain’s second daughter, who had just completed a year of piano study in Berlin.

In November 1894, Hopekirk played her Concertstück with the Scottish Orchestra under Georg Henschel in Edinburgh and Dundee.  The Scotsman found the work “of undoubted character, pervaded by a tone of serious musicianship, and if a little grandiose at times by no means lacking in distinction.”  A reviewer for Musical Opinion thought the work “revealed a certain freshness and unconventionality” while falling short on techniques of orchestration and structure.

Relocation to Boston: New England Conservatory and Second New England School

With most of her performances occurring in Great Britain, Hopekirk and Wilson exchanged their Paris apartment for a fifth-floor flat in Chelsea, London, in late 1895.  Hopekirk assembled another class of piano students and began to edit her Parisian manuscripts, intending to promote them on a third tour of the United States beginning in February 1897.

Her plans changed radically in late January when Wilson suffered severe injury in a traffic accident in Leicester Square.  Realizing that she would need to procure a dependable income, Hopekirk contacted her Leipzig classmate George Chadwick, who had just become director of New England Conservatory in Boston.  Chadwick was delighted to offer her a contract to begin teaching piano there in September.

Hopekirk and Wilson relocated to Boston, their favorite American city, in late summer 1897.  Over the four years of her tenure at the Conservatory, Hopekirk taught thirty-two piano students and revived her performance career through frequent appearances on faculty concerts.  She also gave recitals in venues across New England and Canada and appeared three times in concert with the Kneisel Quartet.  Her work for soprano, violin and piano Under the Still, White Stars was published by The Musical Record in 1899.  One of the few new compositions she completed during her years at the Conservatory, this effective setting of R. Mortimer Wheeler’s poem of affection for a distant beloved, garnered Second Prize in the “Songs for Concert Use” category of the Record’s annual competition for composers.

Hopekirk played her largest composition, the unpublished Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra in D Major (subtitled “In the Mountains”), for the first time with the Boston Symphony in Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, December 1900.  The Cambridge Tribune found “the Scottish strain” (likely the secondary theme) of the first movement to be “decidedly the most pleasing” moment in the concerto.  While the third movement was “brilliant at times,” portions of it also were “flimsy and sketchy.”  Designating the second movement (“Idyll”) the weakest, the Tribune poked fun at Hopekirk’s programmatic subtitles, referring once more to her avoidance of compositional development:

The themes, although not wanting in grace and spontaneity, have no logical development, and are reiterated with a persistency which at last becomes wearisome.  This was especially the case in the Idyll, where the lovers seemed to get hopelessly lost in the woods, and whether they found themselves again in the mountains is a matter of grave doubt.

Unfortunately, an objective assessment of the concerto is not possible today. Research by Dana Muller indicates the manuscripts of the conductor score and orchestra parts of the concerto that were used for performances in Boston, Edinburgh and Glasgow no longer exist, and the fate of a two-piano score once played in Boston is unknown.

Hopekirk grew increasingly dissatisfied with her work at the Conservatory in the four months following her concerto premiere.  From the start she had strained against procedures of the institution, ranging from academic grading to the use of published instructional methods for piano technique.  Her aversions to schedules, charts, and the ringing of class bells, as well as the Conservatory’s insistence on teaching piano lessons in small classes, prompted her to resign in late spring 1901.

French impressionism and Celtic Britain

For the next forty years Hopekirk maintained a teaching studio at her home in Brookline.  Set free from institutional restrictions and protocols, she came to be known as an idealistic, demanding teacher.  Reflecting on the personality and influence of her former teacher and mentor, Constance Huntington Hall wrote:

Her own single-minded, almost inexorable, devotion to music made her impatient of anything that kept her pupils from regarding their work with her as of paramount importance.  Those who could not take the same attitude were unhappy; others, stimulated by her personality, her wide artistic experience, and her progressive interest in all branches of music, responded wholeheartedly to her demands as a teacher, and gained a remarkably high standard of musical values. 

Those standards extended to her performing and composing, both of which took on new dimensions through her growing interests in French impressionism and the folklore and legends of Celtic Britain.  After 1902, every one of Hopekirk’s recital programs and compositions reflected one or both of these attachments.

The music of contemporary French composers with its distinctive colors of modal melodies and unresolved progressions appealed to Hopekirk.  She collaborated with members of the Kneisel Quartet in the American premieres of Vincent d’Indy’s Piano Quartet and Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quintet.  Her premiere performances of solo works by Debussy and d’Indy often elicited hostile responses from Boston reviewers who deemed Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse “hideously and ineffectively ugly” as well as “perverse and freakish,” while at the same time acknowledging that the music “shimmered and gleamed with a thousand flashes of color” in Hopekirk’s hands.

Celtic Spirit Assimilated

Hopekirk’s fascination with Celtic culture rose to a level of personal identification.  As early as 1889, she was thrilled to stumble upon a Celtic museum in Halstatt, Austria, an important settlement of the early Iron Age, where she viewed exhibits of bracelets, brooches and necklaces imprinted with Celtic designs.  In the summers of 1901-1908, she and Wilson drank in the Hebridean air on the tiny island of Iona and listened to ancient folk songs in Oban and other seaside towns on the west coast of Scotland. As Hopekirk herself affirmed in an article for The Etude in 1904, she had assimilated the Celtic spirit of her ancestors and exhibited such by habitually donning “a lace ruffle . . . over her hand” and “an old Celtic medallion at her throat”.   

Certain piano works of Edward MacDowell drew Hopekirk’s attention for their Celtic connections.  She gave many performances of his Fourth Sonata (“Keltic”), a rhapsodic commentary on the legends of the beautiful Deidré and the hero Cuchullin.  “She breathes freely in the Keltic atmosphere,” Philip Hale observed.  “The legends are to her as historical facts, and the superstitions, no doubt, appeal to her understanding.” 

In Hopekirk's estimation, the literary works of Fiona Macleod, pseudonym for William Sharp, were the most compelling expressions of the Celtic muse.  Sharp was the respected author of literary biographies and criticism and, with his wife Elizabeth Sharp, editor of an anthology of Celtic poetry.  In a rare instance of male-to-female pseudonymic exchange, Sharp began a parallel writing career as Fiona Macleod in 1894, producing Romantic novels, poems and plays that cast ancient Scottish myths in a haunting, supernatural atmosphere.  To keep his dual personality secret, Sharp engaged his sister to handwrite Fiona’s personal letters.  Hopekirk corresponded with Fiona for a short time before Sharp’s death in 1905 and exuberantly recommended her works to friends, including composer Charles Martin Loeffler and art collector/socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner.  She also set Macleod poetry to music in Five Songs to Verses by Fiona Macleod and Six Poems by Fiona Macleod.

Hopekirk's collection Seventy Scottish Songs, published in 1905, was among the first of her major compositions to bear the imprint of her Celtic passions.  In setting the songs with piano accompaniments, she wished to present popular Lowland songs and unfamiliar Highland (or Celtic) songs side by side in a single volume.  Lowland melodies, exemplified by the popular tunes Auld Lang Syne and Blue Bells of Scotland, were “principally of an idyllic and pastoral character” and were based on major and minor scales familiar to modern ears.  Celtic melodies were far more distinctive “in interest and in emotional, weird quality,” Hopekirk claimed, because they centered on the five degrees of ancient pentatonic scales.  Hopekirk equated these differences to contrasting character traits she perceived in Lowland and Highland Scots.  While the urban Lowlander was “placid, . . . canny, pawkily humorous, matter of fact, good-hearted, reserved,” Highlander Celts were “imaginative, . . . unpractical, superstitious” folks “of quick perception . . . and living an inner life.”  “The Lowlander would die for a dogma, the Celt would die for a dream,” she famously wrote. 

Around the same time Hopekirk composed four character pieces collectively titled Iona Memories, which, according to the Boston Herald, captured the “atmosphere reminiscent of the sturdy bleak little island, with its fine historic past and its present of heather, Scotch mist and marvelously tinted sea.”  Composed in Edinburgh in 1905, the beautifully proportioned Sundown became one of Hopekirk’s signature recital pieces.  An orchestral adaptation was performed by the Boston “Pops,” the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Burlington (Vermont) Symphony. 

Hopekirk also composed piano pieces in neo-Baroque style.  Shortly after their relocation to Boston, Hopekirk and Wilson befriended Arnold Dolmetsch, leading performer of early keyboard music and builder of clavichords and harpsichords for the Chickering Piano Company.  Hopekirk purchased one of Dolmetsch’s instruments for her home and thoroughly digested his book Interpretation of the Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.  Her studies spawned an edition of ten pieces by François Couperin; two neo-Baroque dance collections titled Suite for Piano and Serenata Suite (all published by Boston Music); and a host of individual dance pieces, published and unpublished. 

Citizenship, World War I and Scotland Renaissance

The outbreak of World War I curtailed Hopekirk and Wilson’s summer trips abroad but afforded them the opportunity to explore the towns on Cape Ann and the coast of Maine.  Concerned for the safety of her civilian relatives and at least one nephew fighting with Scottish troops against the Central Powers, Hopekirk drew upon Psalm and New Testament texts and American Civil War poetry as material for several art songs.  G. Schirmer published her setting of Walt Whitman’s Reconciliation in 1915.

With the War years given over entirely to teaching and composition, Hopekirk became full-time mentor to her gifted female students Edith Thompson, Olivia Cate and Persis Cox, each of whom enjoyed careers as teachers and performers.  Her prominent male pupils were faculty or students at Harvard University, among them pianist Antoine Louis Moeldner, theorist Walter R. Spalding and composer Edward Ballantine.  In 1915 Hopekirk was invited to direct the music department of Pine Manor Junior College, a new post-graduate wing of Dana Hall School, the private preparatory school for girls in Wellesley, Massachusetts.  Not wishing to take on administrative responsibilities, Hopekirk declined the offer but agreed to teach privately a limited number of the College’s most gifted students.

Hopekirk and Wilson fully engaged with the war effort, shipping boxes of goods to troops through the American Fund for French Wounded and selling flowers in the aisles of the Allied Bazaar in Mechanics Hall, Boston.  By the time American soldiers entered the war in April 1917, the biweekly private musicales played by Hopekirk’s students in her home studio had become public fund-raisers.  Due in part to their admiration for President Woodrow Wilson, Hopekirk and Wilson became United States citizens in March 1918.

The Armistice of November 1918 brought renewed energy and desire for change.  Scotland was said to be experiencing a cultural Renascence, christened in the writings of sociologist Patrick Geddes and spawned by the Celtic Revival of the late 19th century, a movement that had promoted sentimental interests in Celtic mythology, literature, and design.  Having established her professional reputation in Boston over twenty-two years, Hopekirk wished to revive her career at this propitious time in her native country.

At age 63, she laid plans to establish a “student colony” in Edinburgh dedicated to the promotion of Scottish and American composers and populated by current pupils wishing to continue their study with her.  Shortly before her departure, Boston students and colleagues presented Hopekirk with a generous check to furnish the proposed American Music Room in her new home and a unique silver plate displaying the names of thirty Boston musicians with whom Hopekirk had been associated.  Hopekirk and Wilson packed or sold their possessions and, music scores in hand, sailed for Scotland in August 1919.

In November and December 1919, Hopekirk played recitals in Edinburgh that featured her works along with those of MacDowell, Foote and Beach.  Critical reception was mildly positive.  As noted by The Scotsman, next to the assertive styles of contemporary British and European composers, Hopekirk's pieces were “always attractive” but conveyed “no profound depth of sentiment.”  The following February she premiered her D Major Concerto with the Scottish Orchestra in Edinburgh and Glasgow.  Local reviewers acknowledged Hopekirk’s past achievements and praised the “remarkable facility in orchestral construction” and “passages of notable melodic beauty” in her work. The Musical Times, on the other hand, regretted that the concerto lacked “distinction,” and that “her playing, considered by present day standards, suffered somewhat by comparison.”

A few American pupils crossed the Atlantic to study for short periods, but Hopekirk’s private class and American Music Room failed to materialize.  Overall, the degraded living conditions of post-war Scotland made it difficult for her to implement any professional plans, and the national resurgence of musical interest proved less robust than she had anticipated.

Resuming Life in Brookline

By September 1920, Hopekirk and Wilson had returned to Massachusetts.  In 1922 they purchased their last Brookline home.  Hopekirk taught while Wilson managed her calendar, greeted and consoled nervous pupils, and painted landscape scenes in his upstairs studio.  When Wilson died on 26 October 1926, Hopekirk’s life “lost much of its buoyancy,” as described by Hall. “She was vexed and puzzled that she could not keep accounts in dollars and cents when the printed intricacies of musical rhythms she understood at a glance.”  Having tolerated precarious finances since Wilson’s accident, she suffered catastrophic consequences with the stock market crash of 1929.

Two Tone-Pictures (1930) was Hopekirk’s last published work for piano.  She based the second of the two pieces, “The Seal-Woman’s Sea-Joy,” on a melody from Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s Songs of the Hebrides.  A quotation attached to the title (“She sang this Sea-joy all night long,/In the cool calm joy of the cool sea waves”) referred to a Gaelic tale of the Selchie, or seal-people:  a fisherman trapped a seal woman, hid her sealskin and forced her to be his wife;  the woman bore children, taught skills and brought luck, until she happened to find her sealskin; she transformed back into a seal and returned to the ocean.  Hopekirk’s setting emphasized the pentatonic foundation of Kennedy-Fraser’s tune and evoked the subject matter through broken chords indicative of splashing water.  Other late compositions also demonstrated Hopekirk’s penchants for Celtic elements and impressionist style, most notably Shadows for piano published in 1924; several unpublished piano pieces linked to Fiona Macleod poetry; and a number of unpublished art songs performed by tenor Roland Hayes, her friend and Brookline neighbor.

Hopekirk played demanding recitals at the Dana Hall School annually from 1927 to 1936.  Her last public performance, at age 82, was a program of her own compositions for the Pianoforte Teachers’ Society of Boston in Steinert Hall in April 1939.  By the time a stroke ended her ability to teach in the early 1940’s, a total of nearly 250 pianists had worked with her.

As Hopekirk’s condition worsened, friends and former pupils organized to assist her with the challenges of war-time existence and to ensure that she was not alone when her housekeeper left the house.  When it became impossible for her to live on her own, friends took her to a small apartment in the home of a former pupil in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  She died there on 19 November 1945.

At her memorial service two days later, students and colleagues gathered to read the same Biblical passages “upholding her trust in God and her belief in Immortality” that had been recited at Wilson’s service nineteen years earlier.  Having relinquished the odious severity of Calvinism as a young woman, Hopekirk had gravitated initially toward Theosophy, an amalgam of Eastern religions, and finally toward Christian Science.  Hall pointed out that Hopekirk “had a spiritual attitude toward life, but her adherence to forms of religion had an ephemeral quality.  She had faith in spirit and gleaned from all religions the best elements to bring out the beauty of life and art.”

Helen Hopekirk’s historical significance rests to a greater degree on her activities as a performer and pedagogue than on her work as a composer.  She was “a very gifted composer,” her student George Stewart McManus wrote, “but . . . she never seemed to apply the same exacting criticism to her compositions that she gave her own playing.”  Biographer Dana Muller added that her compositions “more aptly serve as a reflection of her strength as a technically superior pianist of uncommon sensitivity and imagination than as a testament to her skill as a composer.”  Still, the best of her songs and piano works are well worth reviving, and space might be reserved on a recital now and then for a piece by Hopekirk spun from a “gude Scotch tune” redolent with the fragrance of Highland breezes.

Adapted by Dana Muller and Gary Steigerwalt from Gary Steigerwalt, “Helen Hopekirk, Scottish-American Pianist, Composer, and Pedagogue”, The Leschetizky Association News Bulletin 2010-2011.