Though Bedrich Smetana’s DALIBOR—seen this week at Bard SummmerStage in a wonderful production by Jean-Romain Vesperini, with an ingenious set design by Bruno de Lavenere, a fine cast and the American ...

The Czechiest features of The Bartered Bride – cornerstone of Czech opera and the first to go international after premiering in 1866 – are in the music rather than the story or setting. No accident: ...

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 ...

Think of opera, and it’ll be the big names that come to mind — Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Mozart. Beyond those, though, there is a veritable host of composers. The New Penguin Opera Guide, which is as ...

Smetana's The Two Widows is one of those fragile, rarefied gems of operatic literature that are treasured by people who collect such delights, but is otherwise little known outside the Czech Republic.

Daniel Slater’s production of Smetana’s great nationalistic opera has been one of Opera North’s most popular successes in recent years. Though the staging is over 15 years old, the concept has hardly ...

If opera is a marriage of music and theater, words often amount to a bridesmaid at best. Librettists don’t get much respect; translators of libretti, even less. So it comes as a pleasant surprise when ...

TO PAY homage to last century's composers and to the tradition of its Slavic repertoire, the Opera of the Slovak National Theatre (SND) decided to include Czech composer Bedřich Smetana's opera The ...