Médée / Georg Anton Benda

A stormy dialogue between text and music, this melodrama by Georg Anton Benda gives voice to Medea, the exiled and repudiated heroine whose vengeance knows no bounds. Together with Sylvia Bergé, member of the Comédie-Française, the artists of the Académie de l'Opéra-Comique present a new version of this work that gave Mozart ‘great pleasure’.

What the Czech-born violinist and composer Georg Anton Benda (1722-1795) proposed with Médée in 1775, as with his earlier melodrama Ariadne auf Naxos, was a new kind of performance combining declamation and music. During a visit to Mannheim in 1778, Mozart attended two performances of Medea that made a strong impression on him: in a letter to his father, the composer stated that ‘Benda, among the Lutheran choirmasters, has always been [his] favourite’. He spoke of the ‘magnificent effect’ produced by the alliance between the recited text and the instrumental passages.

From the moment it was first performed in Leipzig by the theatre company directed by Abel Seyler, Medea established itself as a model of the genre. Its success owed much to the actress Friederike Sophie Seyler, who sang the role of Medea. Nicknamed ‘la Clairon allemande’, after Mlle Clairon, a tragedienne at the Comédie-Française, she translated the contradictory emotions of her character into words and gestures with the utmost expressivity.

The German poet Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter (1746-1797) drew inspiration from Euripides' Greek tragedy to portray Medea as an infanticidal mother, a criminal woman who sacrifices her children in a fit of vengeance. It was this same episode from the Medea myth that inspired François-Benoît Hoffman to write Cherubini's Medea, premiered in Paris in 1797.
For this concert, proposed as a Pleiade of our 2025 production, the artists of the Académie de l'Opéra-Comique revisit Médée in a new French translation by Laurent Muhleisen, accompanied by Sylvia Bergé, an actress from the Comédie-Française who takes on the title role in all her virtuosity.