Franz Benda

Who was Franz Benda?

Franz Benda was a Bohemian violinist and composer. He was the brother of Jiří Antonín Benda, and he worked for much of his life at the court of Frederick the Great.

Benda was born in Bohemia at the town of Staré Benátky. Benda himself claimed to have been born 25 November, but baptism records show he was baptised three days earlier, on 22 November. His actual date of birth seems not to have been recorded, but it was probably no more than a day or two earlier than 22 November.

Benda became the founder of a German school of violin playing. In his youth he was a chorister at Prague and afterward in the Chapel Royal at Dresden. At the same time he began to study the violin, and soon joined a company of strolling musicians who attended fetes, fairs, etc. At eighteen years of age Benda abandoned this wandering life and returned to Prague, going to Vienna, where he pursued his study of the violin under Carl Heinrich Graun, a pupil of Tartini. After two years he was appointed chapel master at Warsaw. In 1732, he entered the service of Frederick the Great, then prince royal of Prussia, with whom he remained the rest of his life.