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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
“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 ...
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 ...
Plus, get the best of BroadwayWorld delivered to your inbox, and unlimited access to our editorial content across the globe. Smetana and the librettist Karel Sabina masterfully mocked all those who ...
Unlock access to every one of the hundreds of articles published daily on BroadwayWorld by logging in with one click. For over 150 years, The Bartered Bride has occupied the top position among Czech ...