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The glass-harmonica virtuoso Johann Ludwig Röllig lent him the money, asking him in return to compose the music for a libretto of his own, Philon und Theone, in which Röllig could showcase his ability on the instrument. Besides bringing Benda to the pinnacle of his glory, Ariadne and Medea launched the vogue for melodrama in German-speaking countries in the wake of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Horace Coignet's Pygmalion (Lyon, 1770). [...]Philon never graced the stage, as if the rather pedestrian circumstances of its genesis had cast a shadow over its fate, especially when compared to Ariadne and Medea: both works not only secured the perception of Benda as the ‘father’ of melodrama, in spite of its Rousseauian origins, but also reinforced his fame as a dramatic composer. For Goethe, German theatre could only benefit from such drastically reduced melodramatic plots, what he called ‘concise tragedies’ (‘kurzgefasste Tragödien’), comparing the plot of his Proserpina favourably to those of Pygmalion and Ariadne auf Naxos (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Proserpina von Goethe: Musik von Eberwein’, Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 136 (8 June 1815), 544). To be sure, this establishes another level of differentiation between the ‘original’ melodramatic model conceived by Rousseau and its German acclimatization: while for Rousseau melodrama had been primarily conceived as a way to reject the operatic vocality that he loathed, its German counterpart adopted a less antagonistic stance in relation to opera, attempting to establish a more fruitful relationship.