BOSTON — As I listen to the overture of Bedřich Smetana’s "The Bartered Bride" in preparation for my call with Boston Midsummer Opera music director and conductor Susan Davenny Wyner, I sense ...

There’s no shortage of movie musicals based on popular plays. Far fewer are based on operas. Max Ophüls’s rarely seen 1932 film “The Bartered Bride,” a seventy-six-minute, giddily inventive adaptation ...

There is much to admire in Daniel Slater's The Bartered Bride, updating Smetana's 19th-century peasant marriage market to edgier times, a century on during the Prague Spring. The opening chorus, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Director Paul Curran transfers Smetana’s comic masterpiece to 1950s England to create an irresistibly energetic production A generation ago, Smetana’s comic masterpiece could still be billed as the ...

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 Bartered Bride’s grotesque yet highly moving story is grasped with tenderness, intelligent wit and hyperbole, as well as an understanding for the long-gone order (disorder) of human lives in the ...

The Bartered Bride was Smetana's second opera. His first, a drama called The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, was an early success in Prague — but quickly disappeared. With The Bartered Bride, it was ...

In an Act One duet, Marenka and Jenik (Christiane Oelze and Ales Briscein) pledge their love, after learning that Marenka's parents have promised her to someone else. Marenka (Christiane Oelze) sings ...

BOSTON — As I listen to the overture of Bedřich Smetana’s "The Bartered Bride" in preparation for my call with Boston Midsummer Opera music director and conductor Susan Davenny Wyner, I sense ...