Biography (read more)

Georg Anton Benda was born on 30 June 1722 at Old Benatek in Bohemia into a family of notable musicians, and studied at the Piarist gymnasium in Kosmanos and the Jesuit gymnasium in Jičín from 1735 to 1742. At nineteen, in 1741, Frederick the Great appointed him second violinist in the Berlin chapel, and the following year he was summoned to Potsdam as composer and arranger to his elder brother Franz. In 1749 he entered the service of the Duke of Gotha as Kapellmeister, specialising at first in church music; a ducal stipend paid for a study journey to Italy in 1764, and he returned to Gotha in 1766. He resigned in 1778, visited Hamburg and Vienna, and settled at Köstritz, where he died on 6 November 1795 aged seventy-three.

His lasting contribution is to the German melodrama, the form in which spoken text alternates with instrumental music. When Abel Seyler’s theatrical company reached Gotha in 1774, Seyler commissioned several from him; Ariadne auf Naxos, first given in 1775, is generally taken as his best work and was received enthusiastically across Europe for its originality and execution, with Medea and Pygmalion beside it. Mozart knew the form through him. He also wrote about ten operas and several operettas, many sinfonias, keyboard sonatas and concertos, violin concertos, trio, violin and flute sonatas, and music for masonic ritual. His son Friedrich Ludwig Benda carried the family line on briefly as music director in Hamburg and concertmaster at Königsberg, dying less than a year after his father.

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