The Czechiest features of The Bartered Bride – cornerstone of Czech opera and the first to go international after premiering in 1866 – are in the music rather than the story or setting. No accident: ...

And it has an anti-hero in the person of a youth with a stammer, who gets laughed at and ends up as a circus bear. The fact that the proposed sale is a trick to enable a genuine love match is the sort ...

So do we exchange jolly peasants for glowering apparatchiks? Hardly – this is as entertaining a version of Smetana’s opera as you could wish, but the celebration of Czech nationalism has extra edge ...

Young Mařenka is madly in love with Jeník, but her father has a better catch in mind for her... From Prague’s National Theatre, Czech film and stage director Alice Nellis revisits Bedřich Smetana’s ...

All eight of his operas will be staged as a cycle in Ostrava, but elsewhere we’ll have to make do with the familiar titles: no hardship when it comes The Bartered Bride, a score of sublime musical ...

Garsington favourite that transfers Smetana’s Czech comedy to a 1960s English setting delights again The hit of Garsington’s 2019 season, Bedřich Smetana’s village comedy returns with revival director ...

Although in The Bartered Bride Smetana largely avoided the direct quotation of folksong, the music he composed was considered to be Czech in spirit, meaning that he succeeded in his aim of creating a ...

Bedrich Smetana deals with love In his earthy opera "The Bartered Bride." It may not be politically correct — the bride is bought, after all — but everything turns out happily in the end. Here's an ...

The opening production of Garsington Opera’s 30th-anniversary season finds the festival at the top of its game. The Philharmonia – one of the world’s leading orchestras – is in the pit, with conductor ...

Smetana and the librettist Karel Sabina masterfully mocked all those who expected the “national opera” to be an idyllic picture of the Czech countryside, with its inhabitants being virtuous and ...