There’s no shortage of movie musicals based on popular plays. Far fewer are based on operas. Max Ophüls’s rarely seen 1932 film “The Bartered Bride,” a seventy-six-minute, giddily inventive adaptation ...

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 ...

Opera can sometimes sneak up on you. Granted, that’s an odd thing to say about an art form best known for high-decibel emoting. But longtime fans know it’s true. “A lot of the best operas take the ...

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 ...

Last year, Boston Midsummer Opera presented Otto Nicolai’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” which is based on the Shakespeare play. This year, the company’s ninth season, we’re getting another ...

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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 ...

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 ...

Marenka sings a far different duet in Act Two, seducing the hapless Vasek (Ales Voracek) without letting him know who she really is. Bedrich Smetana wrote music so clearly rooted in his Czech homeland ...

For over 150 years, The Bartered Bride has occupied the top position among Czech operas. Said to be now part of the Czech DNA, its popularity eclipses that of any other feted Bedřich Smetana opera.

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 ...