The Bartered Bride

It’s a beautiful day in the Czech countryside, but there’s a cloud in the sky for the young sweethearts Mařenka and Jenik. They’re utterly smitten, but Jeník is not wealthy and Mařenka’s parents need her to make an altogether more advantageous marriage. In fact, the village matchmaker Kecal is already on the case. Will Mařenka be forced to marry the rich but dim Vašek, or will true love find a way? The answer, in Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1866), involves romance, deception, exuberant folk dances and a travelling circus. “The Bartered Bride is only a toy, and composing it was child’s play,” claimed Smetana later; he had originally conceived it as an operetta. He didn’t realise it at the time, but he was creating his masterpiece: a sparkling romantic comedy set in a storybook Czech village where boys are handsome, girls are smart, the sun always shines and the beer is good. Smetana sets it all up with a whirlwind overture (a concert-hall favourite), and sweeps the action along on a fresh, bubbling stream of romantic melodies and Bohemian dance-rhythms. But every note of The Bartered Bride has the same playful, irresistible life force. Smetana wrote grander stage works, but he never wrote anything more loveable, treasured in his homeland and enjoyed around the world as one of the most perfect comic operas since Mozart.