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 ...

BOSTON — As I listen to the overture of Bedřich Smetana’s "The Bartered Bride" in preparation for my call with Boston Midsummer Opera music director and conductor Susan Davenny Wyner, I sense ...

Opera holds a central place in Bedrich Smetana's oeuvre, but today the Czech composer's works for the stage have been all but forgotten. Even "The Bartered Bride," the most popular and arguably the ...

There is much to admire in Daniel Slater's The Bartered Bride, updating Smetana's 19th-century peasant marriage market to edgier times, a century on during the Prague Spring. The opening chorus, ...

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 ...

Four fluttering doves, a flying bird's nest, white columns, hieroglyphs, the blue-haired Queen of the Night: after 25 years and 14 revivals English National Opera's classic staging of Mozart's The ...

First staged in 1998, Daniel Slater’s production of Smetana’s Czech nationalist classic sets the action in the early 1970s. So, when the inhabitants of this Bohemian community urge one another to ...

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 ...

Unlock access to every one of the hundreds of articles published daily on BroadwayWorld by logging in with one click. Smetana and the librettist Karel Sabina masterfully mocked all those who expected ...

In an Act One duet, Marenka and Jenik (Christiane Oelze and Ales Briscein) pledge their love, after learning that Marenka's parents have promised her to someone else. Marenka (Christiane Oelze) sings ...