Hans von Benda

Who was Hans von Benda?

Hans von Benda was a German conductor.

A direct descendant of the eighteenth-century composer Franz Benda, he operated in the shadow of better-known Teutonic maestri of his generation, notably Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer, and Hans Knappertsbusch. After serving as musical director of Berlin Radio from 1926 to 1934, Benda became artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, during Furtwängler's tenure as chief conductor. He held this post until 1939. Meanwhile he conducted the Berlin Chamber Orchestra, which he had founded in 1932, and with which he toured Australia, South America and Asia as well as Europe. He was married to Karin Rosander, a Finnish violinist.

Unlike Furtwängler and Knappertsbusch, Benda joined the National Socialist Party, possibly through fear that the regime would regard his Czech lineage as insufficiently Aryan. That his party card brought a certain amount of foreign obloquy on his head is indicated by the fact that a pre-war recording Benda conducted of music by Gluck was issued in America without his name on the label.