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 ...

“My music is rhythmic because I am Czech… the natural music of the Czechs is rhythm – strong and agile rhythm.” (Martinů). How well the conductor Jac van Steen and the director Paul Curran understood ...

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 ...

The Czech Center Museum of Houston will present Bedrich Smetana’s opera, The Bartered Bride, one of the most influential pieces of Czech musical history. Often defined by its quintessential Czech ...

These days, more performances of music from Bedrich Smetana's opera The Bartered Bride come from the concert stage than from the opera pit. The opera is nearly defunct, but these dances have survived.

On 26 October 1928 Paris was witness to a gala opera performance some sixty years in the making: the city's first staging of Bedřich Smetana's The Bartered Bride (1866). Organised under the auspices ...