1722–1795 · Germany · Classical
Georg Anton (Jiří Antonín) Benda was a Bohemian composer and violinist who worked as a Kapellmeister in the classical era; he lived from 1722 to 1795. He is best known for German melodramas such as Ariadne auf Naxos, a form that influenced Mozart. He also wrote keyboard sonatas and concertos, and the site offers the third movement of one of his piano sonatas in G major.
Georg Anton Benda, known in Czech as Jiří Antonín, was born on 30 June 1722 in Benátky nad Jizerou in Bohemia. He was the fourth son of Hans Georg Benda, a weaver and musician. His eldest brother Franz became a violinist and composer, and his brothers Johann Georg and Joseph also served as violinists in the orchestra of King Frederick II of Prussia. The father earned extra money by playing at dances in inns, and the children sometimes joined in with instruments and singing; Georg Anton played the violin and the oboe.
His schooling covered the basics of rhetoric and music. In 1735 his father sent him to the Piarist college in Kosmonosy, which had a school theatre. He then studied with the Jesuits in Jičín, at a college known for its attention to vocal and instrumental music, rhetoric and above all drama. The Jesuit plays, in which spoken text alternated with sung parts, may later have inspired his melodramas in Gotha.
In the early forties of the eighteenth century the Benda family moved to Prussia at the invitation of King Frederick II, a great admirer of Franz's talent. Georg Anton won a place as second violin in the royal orchestra. In Potsdam Franz introduced him to the style of violin playing that the king preferred, and Georg Anton also refined his oboe playing. He was such a capable harpsichord and keyboard player that at times he worked as a coach and soloist.
At court Benda encountered the musical aesthetics of the Enlightenment, the compositions of Johann Joachim Quantz, the brothers Johann Gottlieb and Carl Heinrich Graun and Johann Adolph Hasse, and Italian operas. He stayed in touch all his life with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, harpsichordist of the same orchestra from 1738 to 1768, through letters and mutual visits. Following the king's example, Benda became a Protestant and a Freemason in Berlin.
Count Gotter, a Freemason and the director of the Berlin court opera, helped Benda to introduce himself at the court in Gotha, where the post of Kapellmeister had become vacant after the death of Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. There Benda won people over with his keyboard playing and his Masonic membership. At the turn of the forties and fifties of that century Duke Frederick III of Saxe-Gotha appointed him court Kapellmeister. His main task was to provide music for the Sunday services at Friedenstein Castle.
For the court church Benda wrote almost four annual cycles of cantatas, which had to be short under the order of service, as well as masses and Passion music. He also wrote music for the castle, such as dinner music and funeral music. Running the theatre was not part of his duties, money was tight because of the Silesian Wars, and the court preacher Ernst Salomon Cyprian opposed theatre and opera. Benda staged his only opera seria in the Berlin manner, Xindo riconosciuto, in August 1765 for the 55th birthday of Duchess Luise Dorothea.
His sister Anna Franziska helped him run the household, and at his request she was taken on as a court chamber singer. At the end of 1751 Benda married the daughter of Leichner, a chancery lawyer in Gotha. The household grew not only through their own children but also through a foster daughter and pupil, Susanne Maria Zinck, and the violinist Johann Christoph Reinhardt. Benda often withdrew to his garden by the canal outside the Sundhausen Gate to compose.
For the first fifteen years Benda rarely left Gotha. When he complained to the duke that he lacked artistic stimulation, the duke granted him a kind of stipend for a trip through Italy lasting several months. In Munich the Elector Max Joseph gave him a gold watch for playing a keyboard concerto of his own at Nymphenburg Palace. In northern Italy Benda joined the travelling party of Prince Leopold Friedrich Franz of Dessau, whose entourage included the Kapellmeister Friedrich Wilhelm Rust.
In Venice the travellers met Hasse and Anton Schweitzer in person. Benda at first rejected opera buffa: at a Galuppi opera he left the performance early in anger, but after another visit to the opera a few days later he was lastingly won over by the Italian manner. In Florence he was impressed by Gluck's Alceste, in Rome he heard Christmas oratorios and Allegri's Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, and at the end of February in Naples he heard Pergolesi's Stabat mater. In early June 1766 Benda was back in Gotha.
Benda was raised to the rank of court music director, but he could not turn his Italian impressions into a grand opera and had to confine himself to the smaller and cheaper intermezzo. The Italian singers hired for this were dismissed right after the duchess died in 1767. The grieving duke, who himself died in March 1772, had in any case rejected non-church music other than chamber music.
The years of creative drought ended only in May 1774, when the company of the Swiss-born director Abel Seyler, experienced in Singspiel, arrived in Gotha. The young Duke Ernst II later engaged the whole troupe. It included Conrad Ekhof, the married couple Brandes and the Kapellmeister Schweitzer, whom Benda knew from Venice. Brandes had written a libretto of Ariadne for his wife and asked Benda to set it, because Schweitzer's version had remained unfinished.
In January 1775 Ariadne auf Naxos was performed with Esther Charlotte Brandes in the title role, wearing a costume newly modelled on antiquity. The success was loud: critics in Germany, and later across Europe, spoke well of its originality, gentle character and inventive performance. Within three years Benda then wrote his best-known stage works to librettos by Gotter: Der Jahrmarkt, Medea, Walder, Romeo und Julie (with a happy ending) and Der Holzhauer. Later, in 1779, the melodrama Pygmalion was staged in Vienna.
In September 1775 Seyler left Gotha ahead of schedule with part of his company, including the Brandes couple and Benda's two eldest sons, Friedrich Ludwig and Heinrich, who played violin. Duke Ernst then set up the first German court theatre with a permanent ensemble, which townspeople could also attend. Ekhof received the artistic direction.
Benda left his post in Gotha. For a time he was music director of the Hamburg theatre, and he visited Vienna and other cities. In Vienna he hoped to become Kapellmeister of the German opera that Joseph II planned to found, but his music did not suit the taste of the imperial family. He settled in the small hamlet of Köstritz.
Benda died on 6 November 1795 in Köstritz, in Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. His son Friedrich Ludwig (1752–1796) carried on the family's musical tradition only briefly: he was music director in Hamburg, then at Ludwigslust Castle in Mecklenburg, and finally concertmaster in Königsberg. He outlived his father by less than a year.
Benda is remembered above all for the German melodrama, a kind of musical theatre that left its mark on Mozart. Seyler commissioned several successful melodramas from him, including Pygmalion, Medea and Ariadne auf Naxos. Ariadne auf Naxos is usually ranked as his finest work: at its first staging in 1775 it won enthusiastic reviews in Germany and then across Europe.
His output includes roughly ten operas, several operettas and melodramas, such as Almansor und Nadine, Medea and Ariadne auf Naxos. Gotha heard the opera seria Xindo riconosciuto in 1765, then the intermezzo Il buon marito in 1766. The year 1775 brought the Singspiel Der Jahrmarkt in Gotha and Medea in Leipzig; 1776 brought Walder and Romeo und Julie, 1778 Der Holzhauer oder Die drey Wünsche, and 1787 Das tartarische Gesetz in Mannheim. Most librettos were by Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter, whereas Johann Christian Brandes wrote the one for Ariadne auf Naxos.
The melodrama Pygmalion, to a libretto by Gotter, was staged in Vienna in 1779. Almansor und Nadine (1791) is a revision of the melodrama Philon und Theone, also given in Vienna in 1779; the author of its libretto is unknown. Romeo und Julie ends happily.
Benda's melodramas came about thanks to Seyler's company: after arriving in Gotha in 1774, Seyler commissioned several successful melodramas from the composer. Brandes wrote the libretto of Ariadne for his wife, Benda supplied the music in January 1775, and the result was a sensational success. To Gotter's librettos he then wrote his best-known stage works.
He staged his only opera seria in the Berlin manner in Gotha. After his journey to Italy he was drawn to the Italian style, but money and the tastes of the court did not allow him to realise it in a grand opera in Gotha, so he confined himself to the intermezzo.
For the court church Benda wrote cantatas, masses and Passion music, and he also composed music for Masonic rituals. Beyond the stage he left much instrumental music: sinfonias, keyboard sonatas, keyboard concertos and violin concertos, along with a smaller number of trio sonatas and of sonatas for violin and for flute. One of his harpsichord concertos, in C, was heard in a 1987 Apple video.
The site has one publication of Benda's keyboard music: the 3. Satz aus der Sonate in G-Dur for piano, intermediate level.