The Vienna State Opera will present Bedřich Smetana’s beloved comic opera Die verkaufte Braut (The Bartered Bride) on March 31, 2026, as part of its spring repertory season.

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 ...

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 ...

Musically, Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride is marvellous, vivid, dance-infused work. In the second performance of the run, conductor Jac van Steen and the Philharmonia Orchestra were achieving ...

The Bartered Bride will begin performances at the National Theatre in Prague this week. Performances run 25 August - 20 December. Smetana and the librettist Karel Sabina masterfully mocked all those ...

Nicely timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Sir Peter Moore’s ‘Opera in English’ series comes this outstanding new version of The Bartered Bride. By almost any reckoning, this is the most ...