Sebastian Benda | Sebastian Benda

From the Baroque period until the early 20th century great musicians were not only instrumental virtuosos but also creators of their own works. Many of them, such as for example Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or Ferruccio Busoni too came from important musical families or had their roots in an environment in which music was already a dominant part of their daily life in their childhood.

Sebastian Benda boy, drawing by Lissmann, 1930

The pianist Sebastian Benda too was born into a long musical tradition in 1926. His father, the Swiss native Jean Benda, was a well-known violin teacher who taught at the Hoch’s Konservatorium in Frankfurt am Main. In 1933 he returned to Switzerland with his two children—Lola and Sebastian—and his wife Dora Hamann Benda, a violist and poet, who was solo violist with the Beromünster Radio Orchestra under conductor Hermann Scherchen. When his parents recognized the precocious musical talent of their son they started by teaching him music themselves before having various teachers of piano, harmony and counterpoint instruct him.

Young Sebastian Benda, sculpted by Simecek

In Frankfurt with his parents and sister

When he was only nine, Sebastian’s compositions attracted the attention of renowned composers such as Arthur Honegger, Frank Martin, Alfredo Casella and Joaquin Nin, who predicted a brilliant future for the talented youngster. Frank Martin declared his willingness to support Sebastian’s development as a composer and to become his teacher. In view of the career difficulties of composers at that time Martin wrote to his pupil’s parents: “It is important that Sebastian dedicates himself to the serious study of an instrument, for the composer’s métier does not offer anyone a genuine way of making a living unless he concentrates on composing tangos and march music.”

“I listened with great interest to the compositions of Jean Sebastian Benda, who seems to me to have an extraordinarily precocious temperament and an undeniable creative gift.”
Arthur Honegger-21st december 37

Years later in an article dedicated to Frank Martin, Sebastian Benda recalled:
“After receiving this letter I doubled my effort on the piano, but continued to compose with all my heart. Although in the judgment of renowned musicians I was precocious and studied harmony and counterpoint, composing was a very personal act of letting go for me, a spiritual state in which music served as the medium for direct expression.”

He also wrote:
“My personal recollections of Frank Martin come from my childhood, when I became his pupil in composition at the age of eleven. In Geneva he analyzed my compositions with great wisdom and gave me valuable advice. From that time on Martin was always there in the various phases of my life, whether as a composer, a teacher, an artist, a person or a friend.”

Already at the age of eleven Sebastian often stood on the podium as the partner of his older sister, the violinist Lola Benda, and in a short time he also acquired an impressive piano repertoire, which made it possible for him to give piano recitals in Switzerland at the early age of thirteen and to commence studies at the Geneva Music Conservatorium.

After completing his studies at this institution with the soloist diploma, "Prix de virtosité", Edwin Fischer, recognising the young Sebastian's potential, invited him to be his regular disciple and to take part in the Lucerne Festival, bequeathing his profound musical knowledge based especially on the tradition of the composers Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms Sebastian Benda was one of the few pupils whom Fischer taught for a longer period.

He studied with Fischer for seven years and in this way received the essence of a transcendental art, a piano tradition which, starting with Edwin Fischer, via Martin Krause, Franz Liszt and Carl Czerny formed a direct genealogical line to Ludwig van Beethoven.

Together with Edwin Fischer, at an early age Benda performed as a soloist in several concert series in Switzerland. This marked the beginning of a career as a solo pianist which ultimately took him to 40 countries in Europe, Asia and North and South America.

After Fischer’s death Sebastian Benda wrote this about him:
“I was given the privilege of becoming very closely acquainted with Edwin Fischer. Not only was I his pupil, I was also given the honor of performing concertos for piano and orchestra by Mozart and Bach under his direction. Fischer was one of the last personalities who in our age of objectivity preserved the mystical art of sensitivity for sound.
He was much more than a great pianist: he was a great musician with the rare gift of being able to communicate the joy and mystery of a composition. He possessed great charisma and sought after the true value of an art which was constantly renewing itself; he was a creator of the new in the truest sense of the word. Despite his profound musical knowledge he was a highly instinctive musician. He taught us this: “You should not seek anything in the music; it reveals itself to you on its own. Make this invisible link so that the composer’s flow of ideas comes to you: listen, listen, listen…’”

The search for new values in destroyed post-war Europe manifested itself in music too in a radical break with composing traditions. This “mood of regeneration” in the first years after World War II also affected the young Benda, who now dedicated himself more strongly to the interpretation of contemporary music: for instance, among other things in 1949 he participated as pianist and chamber musician at the “Tage für Neue Musik” in Darmstadt. Realising the different directions contemporary music was taking, he decided to dedicate himself professionally to musical interpretation from then on, with composition remaining a personal activity.

Darmstat after the World War II with his sister Lola and the composer Hermann Heiss

In 1952 he went on a tour of South America. In Brazil he discovered a new fascinating world which impressed him to such an extent that he decided to settle there.

Benda no aeroporto de ZH embarcando para o Brasil

Departure from Europe (Zurich airport)

Years later he wrote about this:
“In Brazil the countryside, the climate, the people and the way of life in general were completely different from what I was used to, and many principles that I subscribed to had to be extended through a new way of looking at things and through tolerance so that I could be positively affected by these differences.”

Experiencing the dynamism and the life in the new world

Benda rapidly expanded his repertoire to include the works of Heitor Villa-Lobos and other South American composers, which he subsequently performed all over the world.

With Luzia do Eirado Dias, a musician-pedagogue, he formed a family, having five children - Angela, Christian, François, Nancy and Denise - who all became professional musicians and with whom, in the last period of his life, he enjoyed a musical activity.

Sebastian Benda lived in Brazil for almost three decades (1952-1981) and from there went on concert tours in many countries, mainly in Europe, where he was acclaimed by the public and specialised critics.

1969 tour, concerts in Germany, in Vienna 1960 in Town Hall, New York, 1966

As a soloist he performed with orchestras such as the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, NDR Hamburg, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Kol Israel Orchestra Jerusalem, The Hague Philharmonic, the George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra Bucharest, the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra and the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra.

Leading conductors such as Hermann Scherchen, Hans von Hoesslin, Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, Erich Schmidt, Ernest Bour, Takashi Asahina as well as the brasilians conductors Souza Lima, Eleazar de Carvalho , Isaac Karabtchewsky or Camargo Guarnieri valued Benda as a congenial partner and performer.

In 1958 Sebastian Benda was honored with the Bach Medal of the Harriet Cohen International Music Award Council after performing three piano recitals with different programs in London’s Wigmore Hall within a single week.

The intensive cooperation with Frank Martin, which lasted until the composer’s death in 1974, reached its high point in the complete recording of Martin’s works for solo piano and under the composer’s baton, his Ballade for piano and orchestra witch he performed numerous times during his career. Later, in partnership with Paul Badura-Skoda he recorded Martin’s work for piano and orchestra. In one of the many lectures Sebastian Benda gave around the world, he described his relationship with Martin in the following way: “To me Frank Martin was not only an incomparable composer whose works gripped audiences on the different continents with their emotionality; to me he was the master, teacher, adviser, friend and in the final analysis conductor of his own works with whom I had the honor to work.”

Under the baton of Frank Martin during the recording of the Ballade

During his time in Brazil Benda’s artistic engagement was equally intensive and varied: He initiated concert series, founded chamber music ensembles, worked out plans for developing Brazilian cultural life and cooperated with several faculties of music in the country and was ultimately honored by the Brazilian government with the “Villa-Lobos Medal.”

With students, including his future wife Luzia do Eirado Dias, at the front right

After being appointed a faculty member of the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Graz, Austria, Sebastian Benda returned to Europe with his family in 1981 to work until 1994 as professor and rector at what is now the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG). In this phase of his life he emphasized teaching piano. In numerous performance classes at various universities in for instance Paris, Cologne, Basel, London or Tokyo, in his master classes for piano and chamber music and through his lecture-recitals which combined his broad knowledge of the history of music with highly sensitive interpretations, he made a lasting impression on whole generations of young musicians.

Recital during master classes at Musachino Academia Musicae, Tokyo 1994 during the filming of his biographical documentary, for the Czech TV

Right up to the last moments of his life in February 2003 Sebastian Benda devoted himself totally to music by composing cadenzas, doing transcriptions, arranging and revising works mainly from the eighteenth century and making recordings with his children and friends.

Sebastian Benda was a great humanist whose charismatic personality and strong presence were a powerful attraction to all people, as was especially obvious with concert audiences. His playing, like his character, was marked by great poetry and simplicity, as well as great energy and vitality, entirely in a Schumannesque sense. He was also a musician of great depth in whose interpretations there was no place for the superficial and the superfluous.