The Bartered Bride 20 June 2008". Národní divlado (National Theatre, Prague). June 2008. Archived from the original on 27 September 2011 . Retrieved 21 June 2009.

Set in a country village and with realistic characters, it tells the story of how, after a late surprise revelation, true love prevails over the combined efforts of ambitious parents and a scheming marriage broker. In February 1869 Smetana had the text translated into French, and sent the libretto and score to the Paris Opera with a business proposal for dividing the profits. The management of the Paris Opera did not respond. [21] The opera was first performed outside its native land on 11 January 1871, when Eduard Nápravník, conductor of the Russian Imperial Opera, gave a performance at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. The work attracted mediocre notices from the critics, one of whom compared the work unfavourably to the Offenbach genre. Smetana was hurt by this remark, which he felt downgraded his opera to operetta status, [22] and was convinced that press hostility had been generated by a former adversary, the Russian composer Mily Balakirev. The pair had clashed some years earlier, over the Provisional Theatre's stagings of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila. Smetana believed that Balakirev had used the Russian premiere of The Bartered Bride as a means of exacting revenge. [23]This was the composer’s second opera with its premiere taking place in Prague, on 30 May 1866. For Smetana, its composition was a deliberate attempt to create a distinct Czech musical language through his use of folk-dance elements, but his gorgeous melodies and striking choral writing also come through strongly; he is using nationalism as a conduit for a celebration of culture rather than as an exclusive display of superiority. The contrast with other nationalist cultures is striking with the emphasis being on the primacy of love with a distinct message of anti-materiality. The opera has become central to the nation’s sense of identity although it didn’t become a fixture in the international opera repertoire until after the composer’s death.

Synopsis [ edit ] Act 1 [ edit ] Open-air performance at the Zoppot Waldoper, near Danzig, July 1912 Holden, Amanda; Kenyon, Nicholas; Walsh, Stephen, eds. (1993). The Viking Opera Guide. London: Viking. p. 989. ISBN 0-670-81292-7. The Bartered Bride premiered at the Provisional Theatre in Prague in 1866 in a two-act version with spoken dialogue. Sayer, Derek (1998). The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-05760-5.

Think of John Philip Sousa, for example. At home in America, marches such as "The Stars and Stripes Forever" stir deep, patriotic sentiment. Overseas, those same pieces may seem little more than rousing diversions. Bedrich Smetana wrote music so clearly rooted in his Czech homeland that it would be easy to define him narrowly, as a musical nationalist. But in fact, his achievement goes far deeper than that. After a performance at the Vienna Music and Theatre Exhibition of 1892, the opera achieved international recognition. It was performed in Chicago in 1893, London in 1895 and reached New York in 1909, subsequently becoming the first, and for many years the only, Czech opera in the general repertory. Many of these early international performances were in German, under the title Die verkaufte Braut, and the German-language version continues to be played and recorded. A German film of the opera was made in 1932 by Max Ophüls. Eichler, Jeremy (2 May 2009). "Smetana's buoyant Bride". The Boston Globe . Retrieved 22 June 2009. David Ireland is excellent as the marriage-broker Kecal, self-important, venal, everything nasty within a somehow likeable frame; his wonderful entry song, done here with superb panache, always reminds me of Eisenstein’s entry in Die Fledermaus, a gust of materialism blowing away the sentimental smoke. John Findon is a big, shambling Vašek, but a touchingly delicate singer, very moving in his Act 2 number with Mařenka, a love duet of thoroughgoing sadism. And the parents (William Dazely, Yvonne Howard, John Savournin and Louise Winter) do as well as Smetana lets them while casting them as money-grubbing hypocrites.