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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...