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 ...

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 ...

Musically, Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride is marvellous, vivid, dance-infused work. In the second performance of the run, conductor Jac van Steen and the Philharmonia Orchestra were achieving ...

Eric Crozier Joan Cross Bed?ich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, the founding work of modern Czech opera, soon exceeded the domestic framework and became a permanent part of the world’s operatic ...

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.