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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...