Petrus Leonardus Leopoldus Benoit was born at Harelbeke in Flanders on 17 August 1834 and was taught music by his father and the village organist. He entered the Brussels Conservatoire in 1851 and studied there until 1855, chiefly with Fétis, writing music for melodramas and the opera Le Village dans les montagnes for the Park Theatre, where he became resident conductor in 1856. He won the Belgian Prix de Rome in 1857 for the cantata Le Meurtre d’Abel, and the grant took him through Germany, where he wrote a good deal of music and the essay L’École de musique flamande et son avenir. He visited Paris in 1861 for a production of Le Roi des Aulnes, which the Théâtre Lyrique accepted but never staged, and conducted at the Bouffes-Parisiens. He died in Antwerp on 8 March 1901 aged sixty-six.

Back in Belgium in 1863 he produced in Antwerp a sacred tetralogy — the Cantate de Noël, the Messe solennelle Fétis had praised, a Te Deum and a Requiem — into which he built his theories about Flemish music, and around then came under the influence of the novelist Hendrik Conscience. He pursued the founding of a wholly separate Flemish school so single-mindedly that he changed his own name from Pierre to Peter, and gathered a small circle who shared the aim; it did not take, because the school’s case rested on his music, which was not markedly more Flemish than French or German. His principal works are the Flemish oratorios De Schelde and Lucifer, the operas Het Dorp in ‘t Gebergte and Isa, the Drama Christi, a Flute Concerto and a Piano Concerto both subtitled Symphonic Tale, and a large body of songs, choruses and motets, alongside a great many essays. He was made a Commander of the Order of Leopold in 1881 and a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium in 1882.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Benoit
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q733063