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 ...

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 ...

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.

To continue reading this content, please enable JavaScript in your browser settings and refresh this page. Smetana’s comic opera “The Bartered Bride” made a ...

Czech composer Bedrich Smetana wrote his opera The Bartered Bride during a happy and productive period of his life. It's probably good that he was happy while he was writing it; the opera failed to ...