Medea

Fedor Beznosikov and the Pratum Integrum orchestra present the Russian premiere of an innovative masterpiece of the Classical era.

Programme

Jiří Antonín Benda (1722–1795)
Medea, 1775/1784
Melodrama to a text by Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter (first performance in Russia)

Medea, a musical drama, or melodrama by the Czech composer Jiří Antonín Benda and German librettist Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter, premiered in 1775 to general acclaim, including that of the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Performed by

Fedor Beznosikov conductor

Pratum Integrum Orchestra
Sergei Filchenko artistic director 

Photo: Anya Todich

The work tells how the eponymous Colchian princess, in love with the hero Jason, leader of the Argonauts, fled with him to Greece but was ultimately betrayed by her brave but ruthless husband. The story is told in an experimental genre, invented in 1770 by the ideologist of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The new genre—that of melodrama—radically revised the rules of engagement between music, words, and gesture that had been traditional for the European stage since the invention of opera by Italian composers in the seventeenth century. Keen to overcome the conventional and static nature of early opera, Benda, following Rousseau’s precepts, abandoned the entire panoply of aria, recitative, ensemble, and chorus. The libretto in Medea is not sung but spoken, and orchestral episodes prepare and comment on what is said.

The innovative, fragmentary structure of Medea’s score, built on the contrast between the actors’ lines and the music, enables the composer to reflect subtle changes in the psychological states of the characters. By breaking down the operatic syntax that was dominant at the time, Benda forges links between the orchestral score, the text, and the stage. After its premiere, Medea was talked about as a model for a new form of musical theatre in the German language . With its fundamental equality of elements, melodrama seemed to many of Benda’s contemporaries to be a more perfect genre than opera.

In 1784, nine years after the premiere of Medea, Benda completely reworked the score, seeking to achieve even greater tension between music and drama. The composer himself said that his revisions reflected lessons learned from numerous productions of Medea in Germany and elsewhere during the intervening years.

The resounding success of Benda’s melodrama gave a powerful impetus to the further development of hybrid genres, in which spoken dialogue became part of the musical score—from Mozart’s Magic Flute and Weber’s Der Freischütz to Bizet’s Carmen. The performance at GES-2 House of Culture gives the Russian audience its first acquaintance with a little known but seminal piece of music history.

Fedor Beznosikov (b. 1993, Moscow) is a conductor and violinist. He graduated in 2017 from the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied violin under Vladimir Ivanov. He is currently studying opera and symphonic conducting under Felix Korobov. He has worked since 2023 as conductor at the Moscow Academic Musical Theatre. He also teaches violin at the Moscow Conservatory. Since 2024 he has conducted performances by the Russian National Orchestra. Fyodor Beznosikov was among the winners at the Art Theatre Prizes in 2024. He was appointed musical director at Moscow’s New Opera Theatre in 2025.

Pratum Integrum is an orchestra that performs Baroque and Classical music on period instruments. Its Latin name means "unmown meadow"—a metaphor referring to the large body of undeservedly neglected works from the seventeenth-to-nineteenth centuries, which the orchestra brings to modern audiences. Pratum Integrum, created in 2003 , has given the first-ever Russian performances of over two hundred compositions in a variety of genres, from sonatas and concertos to operas and cantatas. Initiatives have included a performance of the late-eighteenth century melodrama Orpheus and Eurydice by the Russian composer Yevstigney Fomin, together with the Russian Horn Orchestra. Pratum Integrum has also given Moscow premieres of Georg Gebel’s St John Passion (2009) and Bach’s St Mark Passion in a version by Jörn Boysen (2018), as well as Antonio Salieri’s Harpsichord Concerto in C Major (2019) and John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (2019). The orchestra has performed under the baton of renowned masters of historically informed performance, including Trevor Pinnock and Peter Neumann, Stefano Montanari and Reinhard Goebel, Robert Hollingworth, and Václav Luks. The orchestra has featured on many occasions in the December Evenings at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, taken part in major international festivals, including the Regensburg Tage Alter Musik and Musica Antiqua in Bruges, and performed in Magdeburg, Saint Petersburg, Gdańsk, Amsterdam, and Utrecht. Pratum Integrum won the prestigious German music critics’ award, Der Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, in 2011.