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 ...

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 ...

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: ...

“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 ...

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 ...

Great is Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera. But much of its scenery is hideous, most of its stagecraft pompous, hidebound, stodgy. In Europe, opera is everywhere sung in the language of the land, whereas ...

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 ...