Born on 17-8-1834 in Harelbeke along the river Leie, Benoit could hardly have become anything but a musician. Indeed his father Petrus Jacobus (Peter James) was a fanatical music lover; he taught music and saw to it that all his children played an instrument. The two brothers of Peter – Constant and Edmond – both studied at the Music Academy in Brussels. The former playing the violin and the latter the trumpet. Peter’s sister – Leonie – was also a music teacher at Sint Andries near Bruges where she had become a nun. At first Peter Benoit composed mainly religious music which is probably due to the fact that, as a boy of 6, he used to accompany his father when he was playing at the Saint Salvatorchurch and that later on Peter himself became a violinist in the church orchestra of his native town. He composes his first Mass at the age of fourteen and the Peter Benoit Museum in Harelbeke contains the manuscript of a “Tantum Ergo” written when he was 16. The fact that the signature says “By Benoit son” indicates that father Benoit also was known as a composer. From this time as a student we know 32 motets. As a child Peter started first to learn the piano and the organ with Master Carlier in Desselgem. In 1851 he became a student of the Music Academy in Brussels where he obtained the Prize of Rome in 1857. At the time when Benoit came to reside at Antwerp, the orchestras here had not yet reached that degree of perfection, which they have acquired since. In some groups one could find a few classically trained instrumentalists of outstanding merit, but the latter were surrounded by a majority of half tuitioned musicians. The “winds” had not that homogeneity, nor the “strings” that skilfulness which are the present qualities of those groups. Moreover, the science of artists, even if every proportion is duly taken into account, was far from being equal to the various subdivisions of this quintette. Virtuosity was the prerogative of but a few and the general artistic development of the members of the orchestra was scarcely brilliant.
