Smetana: The Bartered Bride

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Conductor Jac van Steen was in charge from the opening ‘vivacissimo’ of the overture. The dynamics and rhythmic intensity of Smetana’s fugal stand-alone concert piece are extreme and the Philharmonia Orchestra rose to the challenge. Van Steen has worked in Prague and knows the opera very well having conducted the last Garsington production. He kept the tempos brisk with an authentic Czech folk lilt when appropriate. The Garsington Opera Chorus was in thrilling voice and provided much of the gentle humour of the piece ‘a woman’s work is never done but men can escape to the pub’ with choreographer Darren Royston’s dance steps adding to the general sense of bonhomie. The chorus twisting and jiving to Smetana’s waltz was an unexpected pleasure. This is also an era in which the values seen in the original largely hold. Marriage brokers were not exactly the norm in 1950s England, but there would have been parents then who told their daughter who to marry and expected automatic obedience, as there would have been families where the father took a harder line than the mother. Above all, the chosen setting works because it captures a time of great change as old and new values clash. If some women in the ’50s did not feel they could resist their parents, there were others who did and Mařenka is one of them.

The final opening night of this summer’s Garsington opera season certainly whets the appetite for more Smetana. But given that Paul Curran’s 2019 production (revived here by Rosie Purdie) transposes the action from 19th-century to 1960s Britain, with Elvis fans doing the twist in place of the polka, it’s odd to find an entirely non-Czech cast parroting the original Czech rather than presenting the comedy in an English translation. With misplaced snobbery, “an exotic and irrational entertainment” is evidently still how the Brits like opera best. Bedrich Smetana wrote music so clearly rooted in his Czech homeland that it would be easy to define him narrowly, as a musical nationalist. But in fact, his achievement goes far deeper than that.Bedřich Smetana was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style that became closely identified with his country's aspirations to independent statehood. He has been regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music. Internationally he is best known for his opera The Bartered Bride and for the symphonic cycle Má vlast ("My Homeland"), which portrays the history, legends and landscape of the composer's native Bohemia. It contains the famous symphonic poem "Vltava", also popularly known by its German name "Die Moldau" (in English, "The Moldau"). Set in a country village and with realistic characters, it tells the story of how, after a late surprise revelation, true love prevails over the combined efforts of ambitious parents and a scheming marriage broker. In February 1869 Smetana had the text translated into French, and sent the libretto and score to the Paris Opera with a business proposal for dividing the profits. The management of the Paris Opera did not respond. [21] The opera was first performed outside its native land on 11 January 1871, when Eduard Nápravník, conductor of the Russian Imperial Opera, gave a performance at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. The work attracted mediocre notices from the critics, one of whom compared the work unfavourably to the Offenbach genre. Smetana was hurt by this remark, which he felt downgraded his opera to operetta status, [22] and was convinced that press hostility had been generated by a former adversary, the Russian composer Mily Balakirev. The pair had clashed some years earlier, over the Provisional Theatre's stagings of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila. Smetana believed that Balakirev had used the Russian premiere of The Bartered Bride as a means of exacting revenge. [23]

The scene change between Act I’s church hall and Act II’s pub is also notable because, with the cast being heavily involved in it, it is hard to know where performers end and stage hands begin. It includes some men continuing to dance around the maypole as a way of wrapping the ribbons tight before carrying it off, and it really looks as if workmen are taking up the lino in the kitchen. The pub paints a picture of 1950s English village life as people play darts, and patrons head to and emerge from the ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’ throughout the scene. When Vašek sings ‘Ma… ma… ma… matička’ everyone moves to the other side of the room within seconds, and it is noticeable how the women tend to stay in groups, which is realistic since many may not have ventured into a pub alone in the ’50s. Smetana's friend Josef Srb-Debrnov, who was unable to attend the performance himself, canvassed opinion from members of the audience as they emerged. "One praised it, another shook his head, and one well-known musician ... said to me: 'That's no comic opera; it won't do. The opening chorus is fine but I don't care for the rest.'" [9] Josef Krejčí, a member of the panel that had judged Harrach's opera competition, called the work a failure "that would never hold its own." [17]Paul Curran’s 2019 The Bartered Bride, set in late 1950s Britain, makes a welcome return to the Wormsley Estate in Rosie Purdie’s likeable revival. With a new cast, this folksy happy-ever-after rom-com continues to enchant and amuse. Aside from the opera’s attractive music, the universal appeal of the work (premiered in 1866 and first heard in Britain in 1895) depends on local character and small incident rather than on any broadly dramatic element which, with the best will in the world, is fairly minimal – boy loves girl whose parents have arranged for her to marry another, yet all comes right in the end. This production is enlivened more by the colourful and diverting characterisations from within the chorus of villagers (almost a template for Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring) than the principal singers who, good as they are, bring uneven performances with few moments that either startle the ear or moisten the eye. Sayer, Derek (1998). The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-05760-5.

The opera continued to be composed in a piecemeal fashion, as Sabina's libretto gradually took shape. Progress was slow, and was interrupted by other work. Smetana had become Chorus Master of the Hlahol Choral Society in 1862, and spent much time rehearsing and performing with the Society. [11] He was deeply involved in the 1864 Shakespeare Festival in Prague, conducting Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette and composing a festival march. [12] That same year he became music correspondent of the Czech-language newspaper Národní listy. Smetana's diary for December 1864 records that he was continuing to work on The Bartered Bride; the piano score was completed by October 1865. It was then put aside so that the composer could concentrate on his third opera Dalibor. [13] Smetana evidently did not begin the orchestral scoring of The Bartered Bride until, following the successful performance of The Brandenburgers in January 1866, the management of the Provisional Theatre decided to stage the new opera during the following summer. The scoring was completed rapidly, between 20 February and 16 March. [13] Roles [ edit ] Roles, voice types, premiere cast Role

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Smetana is known to much of the world as the composer of "The Moldau," the famous tone poem from his sprawling, orchestral suite called "Ma Vlast," or "My Country." But Smetana's operas are what truly established him as a founding father of Czech, classical music — and his brilliant comedy The Bartered Bride has become a mainstay in opera houses around the world. Still, both Dvorak and Janacek owe a clear debt to Bedrich Smetana, whose efforts may have done more than any other to establish Czech music both at home and abroad.