For over 150 years, The Bartered Bride has been regarded as a jewel among Czech operas. Said to be now part of the Czech DNA, its popularity even eclipses that of Bedřich Smetana, its creator. Yet at the time when it came into being, in the 1870s, The Bartered Bride was a rather daring experiment.
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 governed by high morals. The Bartered Bride is thus far more humorous than “national”. Nonetheless, its humour is precisely of the type Czechs so love, and hence Smetana’s opera, abounding in irony, scathing, occasionally even cynical, wit, as well as tenderness and simple joie de vivre, has ultimately become “national” in the best sense of the word ...
To date, the National Theatre in Prague has made 20 productions of The Bartered Bride. The 21st was entrusted to the film and stage director Alice Nellis. What will prevail now? Sentimental foregrounding of the life in a picturesque Czech village, or jest and the self-irony with which Smetana and Sabina imbued their opera? Don’t guess. Come and see for yourself!