Preparing the edition for "Medea" 

Melodrama by Jirí Antonín Benda [Georg Anton Benda]

(Staré Benátky, 1722 - Köstritz, 1795)   

Enrico Gatti is currently working at the first edition

of the last autograph version of this famous melodrama.

Medea was composed by the Bohemian composer Georg Benda in 1775

on the libretto of the German poet and playwright Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter (1746 - 1797).

The melodrama is a type of composition in which the declamation of a literary text – sometimes free, sometimes more tied to the music – is accompanied by an instrumental paraphrase. Georg Benda was the composer who mostly succeeded in this genre, so much that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in a letter to his father written on November 12 1778 from Mannheim, 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 work, where he 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 determined opposition to the rising Sturm und Drang. 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. An anonymous version of Medea fills the whole file XVII of the Florentine Novelle letterarie, 13 (1782); Aurelio de' Giorgi Bertola translated both Medea and Ariadne in his Idea della bella letteratura alemanna (1784). For the Neapolitan show of Medea a libretto inspired to Bertola’s translation was printed.

Benda imagined the first version of the drama for a big orchestra with a large use of wind instruments, while the version we are considering – for the first time performed nowadays – is the final and autograph version, just for a string quartet; we should notice that the Bohemian composer writes on this autograph version – slightly shorter – “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 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. The language will be the original one (German) with English subtitles. 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”.