EARLYMUSIC-2020: Georg Benda. Ariadne auf Naxos

Support us Sevcable Port, Artistic Director and Producer: Andrey Penyugin Theseus: Klaus Abromeit Ariadne: Vera Chekanova Voice of the Oread Nymph: Marina Kuperman ‘Soloists of Catherine the Great’ Ariadne’s costume: Lilia Kisselenko Photos by Ilya Kagan In 1775 the Czech composer Georg Anton (Jiří Antonín) Benda wrote a brilliant example of a now forgotten theatrical-musical genre – the melodrama Ariadne auf Naxos. He called this work for two dramatic actors and large orchestra a ‘duodrama’. The genre’s inventor Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote the play Pygmalion in 1762 and added music to it in 1770, explained the essence of the experiment: ‘I have invented a type of drama in which words and music are heard not simultaneously but one after the other, as if the musical phrase is announcing and paving the way for the spoken phrase’. Benda’s ‘duodrama’ follows Rousseau’s recipe to the letter. Johann Christian Brandes’s libretto is actually a prose version of a popular cantata based on a poem by Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg. Each phrase of text is illustrated and emotionally intensified by a short musical phrase. At key moments a dramatic declamation is delivered with orchestral accompaniment. Ariadne auf Naxos was first performed in the court theatre at Gotha in 1775 and was a resounding success. In 1778 Mozart wrote to his father about Benda’s melodramas: ‘I have twice watched a performance of a play like this with the greatest pleasure. Indeed, nothing has ever surprised me so much! You know, of course, that there is no singing but declamations, the music being like an obbligato recitative; sometimes the words are accompanied by music, which then has a splendid influence’. In 1779 Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos was performed at Karl Knipper’s Theatre in St. Petersburg. The ‘duodrama’ proved so popular that the composer arranged it for string quartet.