© riproduzione riservata

Medea, melodrama by Jiří Antonín Benda [Georg Anton Benda] (Staré Benátky, 1722 - Köstritz, 1795)   

_______________________________________________________________________________

The melodrama Medea was composed by the Bohemian Georg [Jiří] Benda in 1775 on the libretto of the German poet and playwright Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter (1746-1797).

To understand the musical genre to which this work belongs we must go back to a strange experiment pondered on and carried out by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: a heteroclite experiment that obtained however an international success. After having tried with the famous Devin du village (1752) the “reconstruction of the lost paradise of musical communication”, Rousseau passed to the radical positions expressed in the Lettre sur la musique française and in the Essai sur l’origine des languages: the historical degradation of the musical language has definitely killed the singing. He imagines a spoiled opera, the only possible one, “in which words and music, instead of going together, are heard in a sequence, and in which the spoken phrase is in some way announced and prepared by the musical phrase (see the Fragments d’observations sur l’«Alceste» de M. le chevalier Gluck, written in winter 1774-1775). This opera was Pygmalion, performed for the first time in 1770 in Lyon on the music written by Horace Coignet. After the ouverture, the score of Pygmalion includes 26 instrumental pieces to be performed during the acting-pantomime of the actor. The echo raised by this experiment was really astonishing: if for Rousseau Pygmalion was intended to be a fragment of opera on the impossibility of singing, a negative if not apocalyptic experiment, it has soon been interpreted as an innovative operation, meant to found a new musical theatre finally freed from the tyranny of the operatic bel-canto conventions. In his Dictionnaire de la musique, under the word actor the philosopher declares:

It is not enough for the performer of an opera to be an excellent singer if he is not also an excellent pantomime. He also has to make it possible to hear the declamation of the symphony (that means the orchestral interventions); from his soul should raise all the feelings expressed by the orchestra. Steps, gazes and gestures must always go together with the music so that everything becomes a unity. The actor, agitated and lead by a passion that doesn’t allow him to express everything, stops with reticences and interruptions during which the orchestra talks for him. The pauses, so filled, give the actor much more than he would be able to express himself and the new combination of words and music produces effects that illustrate in a very circumscribed way feelings and events.

The Dictionnaire would be published only in 1767, but the articles on music written for the Encyclopédie between 1748 and ’49 had already contributed in giving consistent substance to the new ideas. In this contest it is extremely significant that, even before arriving from Lyon to Paris in 1775, Pygmalion was already well known in Italy and in the German-speaking countries. In 1778 it was performed again in Germany, in Mannheim, but in the same country, starting from Rousseau’s example a new type of drama had developed (Melodram, Monodram or Duodram in German, Melodramma in English and Spanish, Mélodrame in French, Monodramma or Melòlogo in Italian), very close to the Sturm und Drang culture, having Georg Benda as its main author. At this time the most important marketplace of the Saxon-Polish reign was Leipzig, seat of a famous university very appreciated for its spirit of modernity. In Leipzig Johann Christoph Gottsched (1710-1766) in his Versuch einer critischer Dichtkunst (1730) had made a cleansing operation in theatre; the most important reform was meant for the comedy, which, freed by the obscenities and the jokes of the clowns, gave all the characters a more correct language, more intimately adherent to the needs of the new bourgeois society. This reforming action continued with Johann Adolf Scheibe (1708-1776), pupil of Gottsched who started publishing in Hamburg the weekly magazine Critischer Musicus (1737-1740), in which he attacked the Italian opera, instead of which he wished for the birth of a national German opera that would have a closer bond between the dramatic content of the text and the scene music.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767-1769) will mention this fact with gratitude, observing that the most important feature for music should be “perspicacity”, leading to an incessant discovery of new expressive means. In 1767 Lessing became literary consultant and theatrical critic for a theatre company in Hamburg which wanted to give birth to a national German theatre similar to Shakespeare’s one. Words and music, according to Lessing, should complement each other in mutual cooperation devising their respective actions in order to clarify the meaning of the dramatic performance; music should never disturb the work of the words: hence the necessity that all the music written for the determined time of a composition should refer in an unequivocal way to its specific character and content, including the authentic test bench for a composer that is the opening ouverture, which “cannot refer to anything happened before and has to suggest, on the other hand, the dominant tone of the work”.

In 1767 Georg Benda came in contact with the aesthetic theories and the dramatic ideals of Lessing, that will lead him to a radical change in his drama beliefs – tied to the Italian unavoidable influence – and to the choice of texts in German. Johann Christian Brandes, an actor belonging to the Seyler theatre company, showed Benda the text of Ariadne auf Naxos he had written for his prima donna wife, proposing him to write the music for it. After the first performance in Gotha on January 27 1775 with Charlotte Brandes as main character, the Deutsche Merkur refers about the “extraordinary impression” it had produced on the audience. After the success of Ariadne, Seyler asked Benda for a similar piece for his wife Sophie, rival of Madame Brandes: on the dialogues of F. Wilhelm Gotter (a poet belonging to Goethe’s circle and author of the libretto of the first Singspiel by Benda Der Dorfjahrmarkt performed just two weeks after Ariadne’s first performance) Medea was finally written and performed in Leipzig on May 1 1775, “ein mit Musik vermischtes Drama”. In these mature works Benda created what we could say a durchkomponiert melodrama form.

He no more put numbers to the musical interventions (as it happened before in Rousseau-Coignet), that rather pervade the text in a widespread way and allow, beyond the juxtaposition (alternation), also the overlapping (coincidence) of musical accompaniment and drama: the synchronization between text and music that filled so much with enthusiasm his contemporaries, among which even Mozart. The result is a musical construction of extremely high emotional temperature, more organic, more structured, with several internal references and a large use of recurring motives or Erinnerungsmotive, memory-themes in different tonalities and tempos, juxtaposed in a dramatic way in particular points of the score. The music assumes a much more important role than in Rousseau.

As Leopold Wagner, one of the Sturm und Drang poets, wrote in a letter “who didn’t see such a work (referring to Benda’s Medea) can’t even have an idea of how highly the music helps the declamation and is able to raise or calm down the passions”. The music is rich in intuitions and effects, in expressive punctuality and dramatic incisiveness, while the use of recurrent themes, functional to the psychological in-depth analysis, anticipates one of the peculiar aspects of the forthcoming German theatre.

The novelty of the form, the style and quality of the music, the use of Greek costumes instead of the normal baroque clothes and the new style of dramatic interpretation used by the actresses, gave both Ariadne and Medea an immediate success and they soon became models to imitate. The two works were performed by the Seyler company and others theatre companies in Leipzig, Gotha, Dresden, Mannheim, Berlin, Hamburg, München and Prague. In Wien they have been performed throughout the whole first decade of the XIX century, so, without being the inventor of this new genre, Benda became the author of two models very much imitated and never surpassed.

In 1778 both Benda’s Ariadne and Medea were performed in Mannheim. Among those who attended the shows was also Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in his way back from Paris. In a letter to his father written from Mannheim on November 12 1778, he writes:

…I have always wanted to write a drama of this kind. I cannot remember whether I told you anything about this type of drama the first time I was here?  On that occasion I saw a piece of this kind performed twice and was absolutely delighted. Indeed, nothing has ever surprised me so much, for I had always imagined that such a piece would be quite ineffective! You know, of course, that there is no singing in it, only recitation, to which the music is like a sort of obbligato accompaniment to a recitative. Now and then words are spoken while the music goes on, and this produces the finest effect. The piece I saw was Benda’s ‘Medea’. He has composed another one, ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’, and both are really excellent. You know that of all the Lutheran Kapellmeisters Benda has always been my favourite, and I like those two works of his so much that I carry them about with me. Well, imagine my joy at having to compose just the kind of work I have so much desired! Do you know what I think? I think that the most operatic recitatives should be treated in this way – and only sung occasionally, when the words can be perfectly expressed by the music.

We can actually find all the features so well described by Mozart in Benda’s Medea, where the composer reaches highly dramatic effects thanks to Gotter’s excellent text; this writer, inspired by the themes of the classical culture, was the last representative in Germany of the French taste. In his Medea he represented the story of the famous mythological character referring to the works of Euripides and Ovid. The characters of the melodrama are: Medea, Jason, her two small children and their wet nurse. Of course the scene is almost entirely occupied by the female leading role, while only a few phrases in dialogue are committed to the husband and very few lines to the children and their nurse. This melodrama had a certain success also in Italy, as we can see from various translations into Italian of the libretto; a performance also took place in Naples at the Teatro dei Fiorentini around 1785. In the XVIII century the text has also been translated into Czech and Danish.

Benda wrote the first version of the drama for a big orchestra with a large use of wind instruments, but, maybe also because of the success of the work and of the need to represent it in different occasions, he went back to it several times and changed both the instrumental arrangement and the duration. We now know six different musical sources for Medea: the autograph of the first version and two other similar scores connected with it, a piano reduction published in 1778, another autograph version of the score where the composer made some changes in the distribution of the wind instruments and finally the last autograph version, the string quartet one, written about ten years after the first one. In it the German text presents several variations compared to the two printed versions we know (Stuttgart 1779 and Innsbruck 1782) and the musical part is shorter than in the previous arrangements. This is the version we are considering – for the first time performed nowadays – and we should notice that the Bohemian composer writes on this autograph «mit verbeßerten zwischensäzen», considering it more functional from stage direction point of view.

This adjustment offers a more intimate setting and can be performed both in small theatres and in appropriate open spaces or larger halls. The autograph score is easy to read and very precise, with rare exceptions of small oversights easy to correct. It includes – in addition to the music and to the text of the drama – several stage directions.

The performance of Benda’s Medea will take place in a semi-scenic setting in the Festival Oude Muziek in Utrecht in September 2014 and will use a declamation according to the ancient theatrical use of the XVIII century. As Jed Wentz points out «finding an authentic performance style for the spoken text of Benda’s Medea is a challenge. It is clear from the rhetorical sources of the period that declamation in the XVIII century was more musical, closer to singing than stage acting today allows. For this performance we will reconstruct a dramatic style based on historical acting sources, both for the spoken words and the gestures. The combination should, as one treatise put it, send the words “with light and warmth into the hearts of the audience” ».