Wikipedia:
Jara Beneš (also Benes, actually Jaroslav, * June 5, 1897 in Prague, Austria-Hungary; † April 10, 1949 in Vienna; pseudonym Peter Brandt) was a Czech composer who was successful primarily with operettas, film scores, and popular songs.
After graduating from high school, Beneš studied at the conservatory in his hometown. His most important teacher was Vítězslav Novák. Even as a young man, he was fascinated by the songs, ballets and operettas of his fellow Bohemian Oskar Nedbal, who was 23 years his senior. But the musical stage works of Leo Fall also held a great attraction for him. During Beneš's activity as a theater conductor in Prague, he published his first compositions. He had such great success with them that he soon gave up his engagement at the theater and was able to live as a freelance composer. After an interim stay in Berlin, he moved to Vienna in the 1930s, where most of his operettas were premiered from then on. He achieved his greatest success with his work Auf der grünen Wiese, which was staged for the first time at the Volksoper Wien on October 9, 1936. The still young Austrian sound film gave him another mainstay.
Beneš's music is inventive and pulsating with lively Slavic dance elements. The composer died in Vienna after a short, serious illness at the age of just under 52 and was buried in the Hietzinger Fried-hof (Group 35, Number 24C). In his memory, the Danube metropolis named a street after him in the Floridsdorf district in 1964 (Jara-Benes-Gasse).
Nevertheless, both he as a composer and his works are largely forgotten today.
Beneš had been a member of the Equality Lodge since 1948.
Note: Translated from the German version of Wikipedia into English.
