This is the first critical edition of Georg Anton Benda’s Philon und Theone (1779). Benda is best known for his earlier melodramas Ariadne auf Naxos (1775), Medea (1775), and Pygmalion (1779), which are characterized by instrumental music that alternates and occasionally overlaps declaimed text and pantomime. Indeed, these works have come to define the genre and are considered the archetypal eighteenth-century German melodramas. Yet Benda’s little-known Philon und Theone—an orphic story of a voy...