The Benda family has occupied an important and continuing place in music in Germany for some 250 years. The founder of the musical dynasty, Jan Jiří Benda, was born in 1686 in a village in Bohemia and combined the trades of weaver and musician. He married Dorota Brixi, a member of the Skalsko branch of a distinguished family of Czech musicians, and five of their six children became musicians, working in Germany. There the eldest son of the family, František, composer of some eighty violin sonatas and fifteen concertos, entered the service of the Prussian Crown Prince, continuing as Konzertmeister after the latter's accession to the throne as Frederick the Great.

Another in the long line of outstanding Bohemian musical families the Bendas were similarly part of the diaspora that saw them moving across the continent in search of court and church appointments to further their careers. The Catholic Frantisek thus acquired a new religion as well as a new name becoming the Protestant Franz Benda. He served in Vienna, Warsaw and Dresden in a rapid space of time before following the Prussian Crown Prince, now King, to Potsdam where he was to remain for the rest of his life, having finally succeeded the court favourite and violinist-Konzertmeister Carl Gottlieb Graun.