The Bartered Bride

…were Die verkaufte Braut (1932; The Bartered Bride), regarded as one of the best film adaptations of an opera, and Liebelei (1932; “Love Affair”), a bittersweet love story set in Vienna. Both films included several of Ophüls’s trademark elements: lavish settings fitted with ornate and glistening decor, elaborate camera movement,…

…second opera, Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride), which later established Smetana’s reputation as a distinctively Czech composer. His later operas were less successful. Dalibor, written under the influence of Wagner, was performed in 1868. Libuše, named after a legendary figure in the history of Prague and intended to celebrate…

…his first song-and-dialogue version of The Bartered Bride (1866) to an Offenbach operetta, and Antonín Dvořák composed an outstanding but little-known example in The Peasant a Rogue (1878). Otherwise, no particularly distinguished composer of operetta emerged in southeastern Europe, nor in Poland or Russia, where there were only occasional contacts…

…folk comedy Prodaná nevěsta (1866; The Bartered Bride, libretto by Karel Sabina), which determined many aspects of future Czech musical usage. The other leading Czech composer of Smetana’s period, Antonín Dvořák, wrote nine operas but remained preponderantly an instrumental composer. Of Dvořák’s mature operas, the one best known outside the…