Programme booklet »The bartered Bride«

BEDŘICH SMETANA

THE BARTERED BRIDE

CONTENTS

P.

4

SYNOPSIS P.

8

“ON THE FENCE, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS” INTERVIEW WITH DIRK SCHMEDING, ROBERT SCHWEER AND ALFRED MAYERHOFER

P.

16

THE RETURN OF MOZART TO PRAGUE ÉTIENNE BARILIER P.

22

OVERCOMING LIFE’S TRIALS WITH GUILE LYDIA REA HARTL P.

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IMPRINT

BEDŘICH SMETANA

THE BARTERED BRIDE (PRODANÁ NEVĚSTA) COMIC OPERA

in three acts

Text KAREL SABINA ORCHESTRA

STAGE ORCHESTRA

Piccolo / 2 flutes / 2 oboes 2 clarinets / 2 bassoons 4 horns / 21 trumpets 3 trombones / 1 tuba / timpani percussion (bass drum, cymbals snare drum, triangle) / strings piccolo / trumpet snare drum / bass drum / cymbals

AUTOGRAPH Score: Czech National Library, Prague WORLD PREMIÈRES (FIRST VERSION) Provisional Theatre Prague

30 MAY 1866

WORLD PREMIÈRES (FINAL VERSION) Provisional Theatre Prague

25 SEP 1870

VIENNA PREMIÈRE 1 JUNE 1892 Theatre of the International Exhibition of Music and Theatre DURATION

2 H 15 M

INCL. 1 INTERMISSION

THE BARTERED BRIDE

SYNOPSIS BACKSTORY The smallholder Krušina is deeply indebted to the landowner Tobias Mícha. To pay off the debt, he has – without telling his wife Ludmila – entered into a contract to wed their daughter Mařenka to Mícha’s son. Mícha has (or had) two sons. The elder son, from his first marriage, had been forced out of the farm by his stepmother Háta, Mícha’s second wife, in favour of her son Vašek, and has since been lost without trace. Now, Vašek is supposed to marry Mařenka. However, Mařenka loves Jeník, a stranger who has found work in the village, and who loves her in return.

ACT 1 The annual fair is in progress. Today, Mařenka is due to be presented to the bridegroom her parents have chosen. Mařenka is disturbed by Jeník’s carefree attitude. When she asks him to tell her about his past, he reveals only that he comes from a rich family, but his stepmother has cheated him out of his inheritance.

The two lovers promise to be eternally faithful to each other.

Krušina has engaged the marriage broker Kecal to settle the marriage between Mařenka and Vašek. Ludmila’s objections are dismissed by the two men, but Mařenka staunchly defends her love for Jeník. She refuses to sign the marriage contract that had been prepared.

The villagers celebrate merrily.

4 Previous pages: SCENE

SYNOPSIS

ACT 2 The men sing about the power of beer to banish all worries, Jeník praises the power of love, Kecal the power of money.

Mařenka has been spying on the dressed-up Vašek. Using the fact that they have never seen each other, she portrays his intended bride as a violent harridan. She accepts Vašek’s advances to her to the point where he swears that he will give up Mařenka.

Meanwhile, Kecal has succeeded in persuading Jeník to give up Mařenka with an offer of 300 guilders, backed by threats.

However, Jeník makes two conditions: he will only give her up in favour of Mícha’s son, and the marriage will cancel the bride’s father’s debts. Jeník’s renunciation of Mařenka is signed and sealed before the eyes of the outraged festive villagers.

ACT 3 A circus has erected its tent on the fairground. The artists show off their skills to Vašek. In the course of this, Vašek falls in love with the performer Esmeralda, who persuades him to stand in at the performance for the drunken actor playing the dancing bear.

Kecal wants to conclude the contract in the presence of the parents, but Vašek declares that he has no desire to marry Mařenka.

Kecal and Krušina confront Mařenka with Jeník’s signature bartering her away. Vašek recognizes Mařenka as the attractive woman who warned him off the previous day, and agrees to the wedding. Distressed, Mařenka is given a little time to think. She cannot understand Jeník’s betrayal of their love.

When Jeník approaches Mařenka, she rejects all his attempts to explain, and only wants to know if it is his signature on the contract. Jeník admits it. When Jeník joins with Kecal in pressing her to agree to marry Mícha’s son, she calls the parents together with the whole village to end the painful situation by agreeing to marry Vašek. Then Mícha and Háta recognize Jeník as their exiled son. Together with the equally deceived Kecal, they are unable to prevent Mařenka’s marriage to Mícha’s firstborn, Jeník.

Suddenly, panic breaks out – the bear has escaped! But it is actually Vašek in the bearskin, who is enraged. His mother, Háta, calls him to heel, and Mícha offers Jeník his hand in reconciliation and gives the bridal couple his blessing.

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Following pages:

PETER KELLNER as KECAL FRANZ XAVER SCHLECHT as KRUŠINA

MARGARET PLUMMER as LUDMILA SUPERNUMERARIES

DIRK SCHMEDING (DIRECTOR), ROBERT SCHWEER (SETS) AND ALFRED MAYERHOFER (COSTUMES) TALK TO SERGIO MORABITO

“ON

THE FENCE, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS” sm

The first question is to all of you.

Was there a moment of tension, of curiosity, of uncertainty, perhaps even worry if a particular piece of staging would work? ds That applies generally to my approach to the piece, which I have a very personal history with. When I first set foot in an opera house, this the first piece I experienced, and I fell in love with it and the genre of music theatre along with it. And approaching directing a piece you love so much is a tricky business. Love can be very quickly disappointed, or it can set you on the wrong track if you think you already have all the answers, so that you don’t really look at the object of your love any more – in this case, that’s the piece. For me, the critical question is, can I manage it so that this totally positive feeling I have about this piece, the vitality it’s awakened in me since my first encounter with it – will this continue? sm What brought you to the opera back then? ds Simple curiosity. The desire to experience something previously unknown. That’s how it started.

rs Personally, I’ve only worked on The Bartered Bride once as a director, and that’s a while ago – it played in the classic fairground where festivals and weddings are held. It was very quickly clear to our team that we wanted to shake the piece loose from folklore to some degree. And we looked for the stories behind the folklore. We discovered fragile figures, a fragile society, and we tried to find images for this.

The vulnerability of a village society like that can be found everywhere. In our rehearsals I can identify with the weaknesses of the individual characters. In the performances of The Bartered Bride I’ve attended or worked on before, this was completely covered by the folklore. ds The piece can become humdrum and remote very quickly if you put a traditional setting on the stage. But the characters are all extreme lone wolves – and perhaps this is in fact a very contemporary feature. Right to the end they fight for survival, acknowledgement, honour, for emancipation from the family. All of them for very different reasons. But they all fight with tooth

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“ON THE FENCE, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS”

and claw, mercilessly, and each of them is somehow isolated in this. rs And there really isn’t that much at stake: they simply want a touch of happiness, but there always seems to be so much in the way. I find this very touching. And all very universal. ds And this is why in our approach we’ve got rid of the everyday dimension of a rural village. rs We’ve chosen a hybrid image of development. It’s entertaining to see how things successively complete a particular atmosphere. And in fact I initially had some concerns about whether this approach would work. But so far it’s turned out well in rehearsals. am I was pleased to be asked, because this is a piece I didn’t know at all. I admire Dirk and his work, and so I took a leap of faith. And then I listened to the piece and immediately fell in love with the music. When I read the libretto, I felt very much at home. I come from a village myself, and the characters are very familiar. These are really villainous villagers, and each of them is fighting for themselves and bullying everyone else. It’s great that we can leave out the folklore and concentrate on the human beings with all their needs. ds Naturally, the decisive keyword is the annual fair. Things get wild in the village when they finally start pouring the beer and people start to let their hair down. Control goes out of the window, and they start raising hell. We meet the village in an unusual state, and the external sign of this is the annual fair, a group binge. The characters are also in emotional turmoil, and have to try not to lose their senses, or to recover them on this roller coaster. am And then there are the quiet moments again which give the characters

depth and let their vulnerability show through. sm You think in a village like that everybody should know everyone else. But at the same time the most incredible misunderstandings and disagreements emerge, within the characters and between them. The degree of social alienation, to put it dramatically, is extreme. There’s the landowner, and there’s the peasant fighting to survive on his plot of land. Money plays a major role. And we learn that Mařenka has already been bartered as a bride at the start of the piece, as her father wants to use her forced marriage to pay off his debts. ds These are the problem areas which Smetana develops. To do them justice, we must also be able to free ourselves to some degree from specific expectations or preconceptions. sm In every work there is always a moment when you feel, now I’ve got my foot in the door, or found a key which gives me access to the world of this piece. Did you have a moment like this? Sometimes it’s only a tiny detail that shows you the way. am I was totally hooked by Robert’s draft for the set. rs We realised that the piece is a nightmare for the bride. And then we decided to develop sequences which portray this nightmare aspect. This opened a door, aesthetic and structural, and we saw how the sequences follow each other. That was one point. The other was that Dirk had worked out relatively early on that he wanted to use the circus troupe, which is written

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DIRK SCHMEDING, ROBERT SCHWEER, ALFRED MAYERHOFER, SERGIO MORABITO

into the piece anyway, to integrate the aspect of performance. I remembered that I always thought it was so dreadful at the circus that the performers had to keep smiling even if they broke something and the numbers didn’t work as they should have. sm So it was a matter of breaking away from a too realistic approach? ds Or somehow doing both, because the characters need a realistic foundation so that they can develop their tragic and comedic sides. An entirely surrealistic theatre of imagery would be just as dull in this piece as consistent peasant realism. The question is, where are the points where the characters flip out emotionally, or become emotionally liberated. These are the moments that let us tip the action on the stage into the surreal. To put it another way, you can’t inject surrealistic moments because you don’t trust the inherent realism of the piece or the psychological narrative of the characters. Quite the opposite: the surrealistic moments emerge from our close observation of the characters.

And where the characters no longer stand up to this, the stage action goes beyond reality. Coming back to the circus, we very soon realised that the circus must be more than stage dressing. It also has to tell us something about the internal state of the characters. This is particularly true of Vašek. The idea for our “psycho-circus” came from noticing that the entire rehearsal at the start of the third act is solely for Vašek. Apart from him, there is no audience. So we use the circus to show Vašek something he doesn’t yet know about life. The performers come from the fringes of society. Their scars tell the story of the many broken bones and falls that go before

every skilful trick. Vašek understands that you have to first get a lot of bloody noses in life before you can really change something. For me, the circus was still very much on my mind from my first encounter with the piece. We’re using the circus as a narrative tool for the whole third act and all the characters. That was a very important clue for me. And one or the first images we came across in our research, before there was any set, was a trampled meadow.

What’s left, when the circus moves on the annual fair is taken down? A sad, trampled, muddy nowhere. am The circus is a therapy session for Vašek. It’s beautiful and incredibly great-spirited of the libretto to make a hero of a handicapped son. He’s a hero because he grows in self-awareness and frees himself a little from the drama he’s caught up in. ds And this makes his fall at the end all the harder and faster, when his mother annihilates him with a single sentence. It breaks your heart when you’ve finally come to believe in him. sm The big question you have to ask yourself with The Bartered Bride is, why doesn’t Jeník include Mařenka in his plan? ds We try to find an answer by taking the duet, which is actually an intimate moment between the two of them, and making it a public setting. So Jeník has to put on a show. This goes for all the characters, but Jeník in particular is under enormous performative pressure, since he wants to get back into his old village. He’s fighting for his honour and reputation, and betting it all on one card, in a daring gamble which could hurt Mařenka so badly, and does in fact hurt her. He’s dancing on a tightrope,

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“ON THE FENCE, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS”

on the razor’s edge, and we felt that this needs to happen in the ring. rs He decides to make this declaration of love a show, to kill two birds with one stone. Not just to win love, but to return to his village home in style.

This is also unsympathetic, because we have a romantic desire for people to put love above everything. But the risk he is taking and the resulting harm are massive. On the other hand, this is also very modern. In this circus situation where a relationship is sold off in such a way in order to achieve another and greater goal, we are naturally also reflecting a social trend where everything including feelings is increasingly publicised for acquisitive purposes. I deeply distrust this trend. As a result, I have my doubts about Mařenka jumping into this relationship at the end with flying colors. ds I’m a staunch defender of the happy ending. I like to hang on to a shred of faith that there’s a point at which the falling-out can be overcome.

And that they can look each other in the eyes, or look at each other differently because they’ve got to know each other afresh. sm Jeník also has scars and injuries from his background. It’s not a matter of making a value judgement and rating his behaviour morally or ethically. His behaviour is also a reaction to his experience. Keeping things secret isn’t just the last twist when Jeník comes up with the plan with the ambiguous contract, the piece starts with a situation where there are certain things in his history which he can’t share with Mařenka – or not yet. am Marriage is still a business. People don’t marry for love, but for love

with rational considerations. Basically, marriage is a transaction between two people, a contract about how they want to make a life together. Will the partner meet the demands I have? Or are they the wrong person? Even in the modern world, marriage is almost entirely limited to our own social circle, people rarely wed outside it. The story begins, in New York or Vienna, with the choice of a kindergarten and school which only certain people can afford, and it goes on from there throughout life. It’s not a good match to marry from a lower class. And love comes and goes. ds The piece has a very physical element. When Mařenka and Jeník meet at the start, you can feel the erotic charge of this new love, and perhaps the worry and suspicion that it might not last and they’ll part again. The dances which Smetana wrote for the piece are also wild moments in which a whole village stumbles around, drunk on beer. But this doesn’t apply to Vašek. He’s totally focused on being able to speak. This is why he stops this wildness. They have to come to him and listen closely to make out what he’s saying. The whole frenzy grinds to a halt because Vašek reins it in. But the third act is a release for him, he discovers his body and the needs and aggressions that are waiting in him, which he’s held in for so long. sm There’s one character we haven’t mentioned at all, that’s Kecal. ds He’s the broker. That’s his job profile. He naturally stands between all the parties and has to find a consensus somehow and set it down in the contract, which in our case gets longer and longer and has more and more clauses.

So from the start he’s the crisis manager, because things aren’t working and the parties are all fighting amongst

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DIRK SCHMEDING, ROBERT SCHWEER, ALFRED MAYERHOFER, SERGIO MORABITO

themselves and with the others. There’s not even a united front in the Ruzina family. The father is in serious financial trouble, with the crazy debts he’s built up and which he hopes to pay off through this marriage, with a good portion for his Mařenka. His wife takes the modern view that the daughter should be left to choose, but Mařenka wants someone entirely different. And there’s Kecal between them. He talks a whole lot, without saying a whole lot. He’s naturally the comic figure in the piece, but even he has a genuine need. am He lives off his fees, which he only gets if the contract is signed. rs This figure of the marriage broker occurs frequently in plays and operas, it seems very anachronistic to us today. His function may be becoming outdated at this point, and he’s made aware of this by the others who don’t really recognise his authority any more.

But if being the marriage broker doesn’t mean anything, then the man himself doesn’t have an existence. This is why he’s fighting for his own survival. sm And Alfred has just described how the aspects of marriage involving family politics and acquiring or preserving wealth play an immense role today, are felt at least as strongly as in the age of The Bartered Bride, wouldn’t you say? What used to be external pressure has been internalised. ds You have to express the comedic aspect of this character in a different way now. Even in the production I saw back in the day, he had a musty flavour, it worked because he was a blowhard, always full of his own importance, went through the evening in buffo style, and

was laughed to scorn at the end. What we’re aiming for here is for the humour to lie in the fact that the character is backing a lost cause. rs “What happens to me in a world where decisions are made on the basis of love?” sm But when I’m sitting in our rehearsals, I never ask myself for a moment whether the character is an anachronism and if I have to bring my historical background with me or communicate it to understand it. We’re familiar with these bureaucratic procedures, specifically if it’s a matter of establishing a partnership for a certain period. And to say that Kecal is fighting for his job is also a very appealing idea. But a struggle like this is anything but ancient history. am The characters aren’t caricatures.

There’s not a single character that’s unmasked and shamed. Even if someone is mocked in the piece, the piece and the music are doing something else. ds This isn’t a piece with a figurehead, where one person stands out, it’s a piece where the ensemble has to struggle to develop and present the characters. The second set of parents, Háta and Micha, only appear right at the end, and there’s almost no way for an audience to avoid seeing them as anything other than a stereotype, to come to understand them at all in the brief time there is to get to know them. But here the circus naturally helps us again, they’ve been thrown into the ring as well.

So perhaps the ending brings us back to the initial question. What captivated me back in the day is the directness of this piece, its candour. You immedi-

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ately understand the characters, their situations and needs. Musically as well, the piece is a bit on the fence, between two worlds, Bohemia and Germany.

Smetana learned from both Mozart and Wagner, and there’s also a touch of light opera and moments of operetta. I

think it’s this halfway house style that makes the piece so accessible. And I think it’s the way it’s between worlds that ultimately gives the piece its depth and wisdom, for all its visual appeal and vitality.

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Following pages:

MICHAEL LAURENZ as VAŠEK SLÁVKA ZÁMEČNIKOVÁ as MAŘENKA

ÉTIENNE BARILIER

THE RETURN OF MOZART TO PRAGUE When listening to The Bartered Bride, one is often reminded of Mozart. There is even a moment when you have the feeling you are listening to the very notes of Don Juan: it is in the third act, when the clumsy Vašek, summoned by his parents to explain why he refuses to marry Mařenka, stammers that a lovely girl had warned him about this vixen who would be unfaithful to him. This lovely girl is none other than Mařenka herself. The sweet, naive melody that characterises her here echoes each and every note (and in the same key, F major) that Zerlina sings to win over Masetto at the end of Don Juan’s first act. Coincidence? Perhaps. But it was in Prague, after all, that Mozart created Don Juan.

There is no doubt that his shadow loomed large over Smetana. The Bartered Bride is also reminiscent of The Magic Flute, even more so than it is of Don Juan: the stammering Vašek can’t help but evoke Papageno’s delightful lallation. And his whole personality, with its dreams of childlike love, is a reincarnation of Mozart’s tender bird-catcher.

In his book on Smetana, Bohumil Karásek states that “never before The Bartered Bride and never again thereafter has anyone succeeded in reviving the Mozartian ideal of joy and gaiety in such an original way”. This is probably true. This is not to say, however, that Smetana simply pastiched Mozart.

Almost a century later, it was a different world that a composer, influenced by Liszt, inspired by Wagner and Berlioz, and driven by a burning desire to invent a Czech national music, was living in to the one of the author of Don Juan.

But having said that, perhaps what sets Smetana most apart from Mozart is not his wild romanticism or his exaggerated patriotism. It’s something much more subtle. We’ll come back to this later.

For now, let’s take a look at what makes them alike.

Both composers share the same love of life, the same tenderness for human beings, the same way of enveloping drama and misfortune in melodic grace.

The same art of mixing light-heartedness and seriousness, of giving depth to

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characters, and of making us love them: we laugh at them and cry with them.

With them, we can walk alongside the abyss without ever sinking into it.

But what abyss is that in The Bartered Bride? Not the one in Don Juan, that’s for sure. At first glance, Smetana’s opera is thoroughly cheerful and upbeat, far removed from tragedy or even drama. It all begins with an opening of Rossinian, almost frenzied alacrity, a far cry from the dramatic chords of Don Juan, or the solemn chords of the Flute.

From the very first scene, the choir sings a song with a reassuring message: “Why not rejoice when God gives us good health?” The act ends with a cheerful cabaret polka, and the next act, set in the same cabaret, opens with a lively scene of jubilation. Nor does the song of the drinkers give any call for alarm: “Beer, my friends, is a divine gift from heaven.” And it is in the midst of the dancing that Jeník and the matchmaker Kecal fraternise and do business. As for the third act, it opens with a thunderous “actors’ march”, followed by a frenzied dance. The opera ends with these powerful words: “True love conquers all, the struggle is well and truly over, long live the wedding and happiness.”

Yet don’t be fooled: the opera is not simply characterised by blanket euphoria. While it is true that, in the end, “true love conquers all”, this sentiment does experience more than a few ups and downs along the way. In many respects, the story of The Bartered Bride could be a tragic one and end very badly.

Jeník’s scheme is either shockingly reckless or astonishingly cruel: without a second thought, he “sells” Mařenka, his love, to a stupid but wealthy suitor.

Or so Mařenka thinks. In reality, the beneficiary of this shameful generosity,

“Micha’s son”, is not the simpleton Vašek, but his elder brother, Jeník himself. But strangely, the young man fails to explain the plan to his sweetheart, leading to him experiencing her hatred, the jeers of the villagers, and his father’s violent disapproval.

To be perfectly honest, it must be said that some of the characters in the opera are far from being paragons of pure love and candid integrity: the matchmaker Kecal is a self-serving old cynic; Háta, Jeník’s stepmother, positively hates him. As for Vašek, he is a simpleton who will be duped by two women, Mařenka and the dancer Esmeralda. Persuaded to wear a bear skin, he will be subject of considerable ridicule as the opera approaches its climax. All this could be seen as quite harsh.

There was certainly a need to add some spice to the plot: if Jeník had explained his plan to Mařenka, we would have been deprived of the bride’s songs of sorrow, not to mention the suspense.

Is that to say that the supposed “bartering” of the bride is merely a plot device and so should not be taken seriously?

No, it’s more complicated than that.

If we did not believe in this story at all, nor in the feelings that drive the characters; if we did not suspect that Jeník, perhaps unconsciously, wanted to put his love to the test, the result would be an opera lacking wholly in psychological substance and human depth. If we did not fear, at the very moment when Mařenka believes she has been betrayed, that she might actually take her own life; if we did not believe in the reality of her pain, we would not believe in her ultimate happiness either. We wouldn’t believe anything. The entire opera would then be nothing more than

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ÉTIENNE BARILIER

a rather dull farce, with all its characters being merely puppets.

Yet it is the music, more so than the plot, that underpins the very humanity of the opera’s characters. The heroine’s song of despair is truly poignant. And throughout the opera, the characters are honed, explored deeply and treated with tenderness and precision. The scenes on open stages or in cabarets are matched by scenes of love that are often painful.

From the beginning of the first act, popular jubilation gives way to Mařenka’s deep concern, as she announces gently but seriously: “If you were to ever betray me, I’d hate you.” No audience can take this lament lightly, with its Mozartian purity. And as happens with Mozart when such a melody arises, one can’t help, at the back of one’s mind, pondering the question: is this song terribly sad or singularly beautiful? When Jeník tells Mařenka about the hatred of his stepmother, and the two lovers begin to sing a duet about how “a real mother is a blessing”, we may indeed smile, but we are faced with real, flesh and blood characters. This is something we will never forget, even in the most absurd and outrageous of moments.

And it is here that Smetana’s The Bartered Bride most closely resembles Mozart. Just as we found Papageno deeply endearing, the simple-minded Vašek touches our hearts when he expresses his love for the unknown woman Mařenka tells him about (“I know a beautiful woman who is dying of love for you”). By the way, Mařenka, who was betrayed by Jeník, is now betraying Vašek! But each time, strangely enough, the person who betrays and the person who is betrayed appear shrouded in the same charming gentleness; the same tenderness unites them.

That is quite some paradox. Can the betrayer and the betrayed be accomplices?

They most certainly can: they are accomplices in humanity, a humanity that the composer magnanimously affords them, in keeping with his melodic generosity. In Smetana, as in Mozart, melody unites and reconciles. It uses every trick in the book and negates all ulterior motives. It provides them most depth of all the characters.

It is, however, important to note the difference between the two composers.

In a word, The Bartered Bride is more naive than Mozart’s creations. Ultimately, wickedness and betrayal are only superficial, and the characters’ final happiness is pure and unadulterated: Jeník appears to betray Mařenka, but we know that this was never his intention, that his love has always been pure. Kecal comes across as a cynical matchmaker, but in the end, like everyone else, he graciously bows to the triumph of love.

What would have happened if Jeník had instead been tempted by Kecal’s money; if he had wavered, even for a second?

Would we give him our blessing, as the father does in the final moments of the opera when he finally recognises his son? What if Mařenka, believing herself betrayed, had considered marrying Vašek out of revenge rather than despair? In short, what would happen if the characters had revealed irredeemable flaws in themselves?

The question may seem idle, but it arises as soon as one considers comparing Smetana to Mozart. For in Mozart’s world, while the music is supremely pure, human beings are much less so.

In the world’s most joyous opera, Così fan tutte, for example, a ruse is used to test the strength and sincerity of love.

All’s well that ends well in this opéra

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bouffe, but no one emerges unscathed.

Smetana’s heroes, on the other hand, are ideal lovers, whose love is unwavering, unblemished and uninterrupted, and whose schemes are entirely innocent. The music of The Bartered Bride is a reflection of their image. In Mozart’s work, the music redeems the characters without their knowledge, and leaves nothing, absolutely nothing, of their humanity behind.

Perhaps this is why Bohuslav Martinu was able to say about Smetana’s masterpiece what can never be said about a Mozart opera, even the most joyful one: The Bartered Bride, he wrote, is “the opera of human happiness”. So it was not Mozart who returned to Prague in 1866, but only his happy shadow. That is itself something to be celebrated.

Following pages: MATTHÄUS SCHMIDLECHNER as CIRCUS DIRECTOR ILIA STAPLE as ESMERALDA ARTISTS

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LYDIA REA HARTL

OVERCOMING

LIFE’S TRIALS WITH GUILE LET ME TELL YOU A STORY Smetana’s life and work would have made a great Puccini opera, brimming as they are with unrequited love and great tragedy, with illusions of heart-breaking intensity, and without a glimmer of hope for a solution, while everything, absolutely everything, gradually spirals downwards on a grand scale.

Even the setting for Smetana’s biography is a dazzling place: Prague, a city in the Danube Monarchy, whose “Kakanian” laws Robert Musil describes and which seem absurd to an outsider – entrenched as they are in the contradictions and disconnects of the Hapsburg Empire mind-set.

These laws resulted in national struggles [...] so fierce that the state machinery ground to a halt several times a year, but in the intervening periods and holidays people got along excellently and acted as if nothing had happened. And in fact nothing had happened. It was simply the antipathy of every human being towards every other human being that we all agree on today, but that had developed early in this state, and one might say with sublime ceremonial [...] For it was not only dislike of one’s fellow citizens

that escalated into a strong sense of community, but mistrust of oneself and one’s fate also assumed the nature of profound self-certainty. In this country, people [...] always acted differently from the way they thought, or thought differently from the way they acted.

Live and let live; initially that seemed to be the hope for the melting pot of Bohemia. In 1848, the policy of the young Emperor Franz Joseph I relied on the mediating influence of great Bohemian families like the Schwarzenbergs. These “Bohemians” spoke both languages, German and Czech, were loyal to the Hapsburgs, Catholic, pro-Jewish and cosmopolitan, and they owned palaces in Vienna’s inner city and in Prague’s Lesser Town. They had nothing to do with petty-bourgeois German nationalism or Czech self-defence ideology.

Yet ultimately, all Bohemian memory dates back to a catastrophe, the myth of Darkness following the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, in which the national culture of Bohemia was lost. “That battle had sadder consequences for the country than the victor’s plan could ever have foreseen.”

From its state of great prosperity, it

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declined within twenty years to a state of terrible hardship, of the most terrible misery,” wrote František Palacký, the most famous and influential Czech historian of the 19th century. Bohemia had since become a province of Austria, and with the loss of its power came a decline in language, which then survived only among illiterate peasants and servants.

But then, as happened throughout Europe, the idea of ​​a dominant culture, a national rebirth, emerged among politicised intellectual groups in Bohemia.

Although during his visits to Bohemia Goethe noted how well assimilated poets there were in dual identity, radicalreactionary currents were growing stronger, preferring to provoke hostility between German and Czech rather than seeking to identify common ground. Throughout Central Europe, the myth of a seemingly inevitable conflict between the “peaceful Slavs” and the “war-mongering Germans” spread as the optimism of the Enlightenment faded. Josephinian ideals finally disappeared. “The path of modern education leads from humanity through nationality to bestiality,” Franz Grillparzer commented presciently.

Differing interests led to open conflicts. When in 1848 the German National Assembly in Frankfurt am Main invited participation by representatives from Bohemia, which had been part of the Holy Roman Empire since the Middle Ages, Palacký – by then the leader of the Czech national movement – penned a famous letter rejecting the idea on behalf of the Czech nation and proclaiming the Bohemian nation’s withdrawal from the German narrative. He also demanded an Austria of free peoples, administrative independence, and na-

tional equality for the Czech language in all areas of public life within Bohemia.

The German Bohemians, in turn, sought separation of the German-speaking regions of Bohemia and their annexation to German territories; they withdrew from the Prague National Committee. The Czechs responded with a decidedly Slavic counter-proposal and invited envoys from all European Slavic states to the Slav Congress in Prague.

This was then immediately dissolved by the Austrian army during suppression of the Whitsun Uprising in 1848.

All this was not exactly conducive to the coexistence of the two language groups. Separation based on linguistic criteria continued at all levels of public life with unprecedented harshness and pettiness, leading to the formation of two separate national societies in Bohemian states with absurd outgrowths, especially since the Czech educated elite, like Smetana, had attended only German schools.

The formation of Czech society, which began around 1860, initially remained a linguistic and cultural movement of a few intellectuals in Prague, most of whom spoke poor Czech, and until the 1880s, it was politically incapable of taking action. Due to Vienna’s hostile attitude to a compromise with the Bohemian crown lands and the perceived injustice towards Hungary, which they hated even more than Germany, Czech politicians initially participated in neither Hapsburg imperial nor national politics.

Franz Grillparzer reacted to Pa­l­acký’s actions with horror. Professor Palacký had gone mad, he claimed, and these Germanised Czechs had learned everything they knew and could do from the Germans:

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For where does this clamour about nationality, this prioritisation of native linguistics and classical studies, come from if not from German professors? That is the cradle of your Slav mania, and when the Bohemian rants most loudly against the German, he is nothing more than a German translated into Bohemian.

In his 1867 medieval novel Witiko, Adalbert Stifter depicted a kind of supranational Bohemian utopia as an alternative to Palacký’s national historical concept. As a counter-model to the gradual collapse of internal order in the Danube Monarchy, a “gentle law” aiming to achieve harmony with peace, economic prosperity, and social balance was proposed to rid the ruling party of chaos, unbridled passions, and indi­ vidual interests.

However, these calls fell on deaf ears, just as did other isolated voices urging that the freedom they had just won should not be squandered again.

THE PRODIGAL SON Smetana grew up in this turbulent era.

In the revolutionary year of 1848, with his love of dance he started a music school, and a year later he married a pianist. Unsuccessful and disappointed, he left not only his Bohemian homeland, but also “Kakania,” a migration path he shared with many Bohemian musicians who had held leading positions throughout Europe since the 15th century. As Mozart and Rossini had already happily realised, Bohemia – and especially Prague – was fertile ground for outstanding European musicians and instrument makers, who, however, found insufficient opportunities in the small country. “Prague denied me rec-

ognition,” Smetana also lamented to his mother, “it is common knowledge that an artist must seek fame and a better livelihood abroad.”

So he set out into the world: not to Munich, Dresden, or Paris, but to the culturally rather modest city of Gothen­ burg. While he was able to gain experience there as a music teacher, conductor, and pianist, apart from a few concert tours he found himself in an artistic cul-de-sac. This period did not bring him renown and certainly not international fame. Of his four daughters, born in quick succession, three died, and his wife contracted tuberculosis and died in 1859. He grew homesick and wrote in 1861: I do not wish to offend, but this foreign country is very repugnant to me. If I had a suitable position in Prague – however, not piano lessons – I would stay home and let all the courts of the rest of the world be, and not bother about them.

He remarried in 1860. Still largely unknown socially and musically, he returned to Prague in 1861, sensing a bright future there. The “October Diploma” of 1860 liberalised all of Austria and a spawned a tremendous sense of optimism among the Czechs. Various groups sought to redefine what it meant to be Czech. What could be more natural in such a situation – then as now – than to search for artists and works that could establish a distinctive national dominant culture? People pinned their hopes on something emotionally folksy as a symbol of an envisioned originality that could not possibly exist in the Bohemian-Moravian melting pot of Eastern European immigrants. Culturally representative buildings were to conserve what was yet to be created.

Smetana saw his opportunity. This was

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no easy undertaking, given that as a musical migrant in Gothenburg, he had not made a name for himself or acquired any particular reputation. The returnee thus placed himself at the service of an overall cultural plan. In 1861, Prague had no institutionalised musical life; the few positions that existed were occupied by arch-conservative, ostensible innovators from the Old Czech group, who, as would become clear, were also blessed with far better health than Smetana.

Interest in concerts and opera performances was not particularly strong, as Smetana found out at his very first concert in front of a half-empty hall. The few music lovers, like him, preferred to travel straight to Vienna, Dresden, or Munich.

POLITICS AND ART: A FATAL MÉSALLIANCE Initially, he sought allies, acquaintances from earlier years, especially writers who, as Young Czechs, were gaining increasing political clout. He aligned himself with them in the Czech choral society movement, the gymnastics movement, and the artists’ organisation, supported by the leading Czech daily newspaper.

By 1865, the moment had arrived.

The Young Czechs controlled the committee for the construction of the Czech National Theatre, an ambitious flagship project, and acquired a majority stake in the operating company of the Provisional Theatre. This gave them decisive influence over national cultural policy and enabled them to appoint Smetana director of the Provisional Theatre; he had diligently participated in all cultural policy activities for five economically hard years, conducting sponsored

concerts and writing combative articles.

The ensemble was delighted with his appointment.

During this time, he allowed himself to be swept along by the national spirit of optimism. But without political pressure, developing Czech musical life was impossible: a fatal module in Smetana’s life. For the marriage of art and politics is by nature a misalliance, something which also quickly became apparent to Smetana when, still euphoric about winning a competition for the first national opera with The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, he clashed with František Rieger, one of the most powerful men in politics and the cultural scene, over the conditions for his next work, The Bartered Bride.

The debate about what constitutes specifically Czech music ended irreconcilably – and remained so until the end of Smetana’s life. One evening at the Prague Choral Society, Smetana, who was working on The Branden­burgers, contradicted Rieger, who claimed it was easy to write a serious historical opera, but difficult to write a lighter opera about the life of the Czech people and told him that he was also working on this. When Rieger stated that such an opera must be based on national melodies, Smetana contradicted him again, arguing that this would not result in a work of art, but rather a random potpourri of songs. Their argument became increasingly heated until Smetana accused Rieger of having no understanding of the matter.

After that, Smetana immediately set to work on The Bartered Bride. It may be that he accepted the challenge out of respect for Rieger’s position of power, but it could also have been that he was aesthetically attracted to offering more than

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a mere folkloristic revue of songs, in the spirit of Weber’s Freischütz. At all events, Smetana wrote in his diary in 1865: I had it in mind to try and see if I could write opera in a lighter style than I had ever attempted before [...]

I wanted to prove to my naysayers that I was also perfectly capable of handling a smaller musical format. They disputed this, claiming that I was far too fervent a Wagnerian to be able to prove myself in the lighter genre. Furthermore, I was determined to maintain the national character of the music throughout the piece and in all the scenes.

Smetana made another crucial mistake at the outset when, in his journaling as well, he tried to measure the emerging Czech style of cultural life against the standards of the major European opera houses and concert halls in the cultural metropolises he had visited during his years abroad. However, this was precisely what the leading cultural politicians around Rieger and Palacký categorically rejected. On the one hand, they could provide neither the financial nor the structural prerequisites for this; on the other, they did not want—and this was and remained their main argument – Germanisation, but rather the deliberate establishment of a predictive identity of their own, which had to be different at all costs and, moreover, bigger and better than that maintained by the official German and Vienna-oriented Prague of the upper classes. The isolationists wanted Czech music free from foreign influences; the only acceptable outside influences were those from Slavic folk culture.

And so the invectives started: Smetana was accused of poisonous Wagnerianism, even the overture to The Bartered Bride was too modern, and moreover he

possessed a dog-eat-dog mentality that prevented other talented musicians from advancing. Smetana was not unaffected by this. While as a conductor he tried to introduce his audience to new ideas, he tended to be cautious when it came to his own work: “Such a step forward must be prepared slowly, and when we take it we must go our own way, taking into account our particular circumstances,” he wrote thoughtfully in summer 1868, after attending a performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Munich. He would see in subsequent years how apposite this feeling was. In bourgeois Prague at that time, Wagnerianism was synonymous with a dangerously traitorous attitude towards everything national. The accusation hit home with the wrong person: Smetana, like many others, was frustrated by ongoing German-Viennese dominance and complained in 1870: “The new ministry in Vienna was set up entirely against the Czechs... a bunch of Czech haters.”

In Prague, politics and culture remained closely intertwined. The more national politicians distanced themselves from a realpolitik struggle or identification with the Hapsburg Empire, the more furiously they debated the key characteristics of a national Czech artistic style, phase-shifted to all art forms. As so often happens, personal rivalries fused with political extremists. Finding a balance between progressiveness and opposition to progress was utopian.

A paradox, then: the national movement’s appropriation of art unleashed forces, creative leeway, and even financial resources that would otherwise probably not have been available for artistic development.

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But these fostering conditions had a dark side, for the symbiosis with politics simultaneously restricted the creative space for art, not only on the part of cultural politicians who influenced the form and content of art, but also on the part of artists who, like Smetana, identified with their homeland but were willing to make substantive and, occasionally, aesthetic compromises for the sake of survival.

Viewing Smetana as a compliant tool of politics is certainly incorrect.

On the one hand, he was too politically controversial; on the other, he saw himself as the figurehead of a new style, which he smilingly called “Smetanism,” in which he sought an artistic form of expression for what he perceived in the musical aesthetics of his time, but also its connection to everyday life.

SMETANISM. ”AS FOR ME, I’M JUST MAKING A START.” BUT FOR WHAT? Growing progressively deafer with his advancing years, Smetana’s acceptance speech at the banquet for the 100th performance of The Bartered Bride, was touchingly modest: I am still far too moved by the magnificent celebration, and everything within me is still trembling, for I truly never remotely imagined the possibility of such a reward as the nation has just bestowed upon me. I am still absolutely stupefied and paralysed with amazement, for the gratitude I would like to express to the entire nation cannot be expressed in words.

I would add that The Bartered Bride is actually just a little game I once permitted myself. I composed it not out of ambition, but out of defiance, because after my Brandenburgers, I was accused of being

a Wagnerian and of being incapable of accomplishing anything in the national, lighter style. I immediately contacted Sabina and asked him for a libretto; in my opinion then, with The Bartered Bride I wrote a piece that not even Offenbach could match up to.

Since then, he said he had stopped learning what Czech music was and where its roots were, but said he was too old and burdened by fate to be able to promise anything for the future. He sincerely hoped that his fellow artists would find the same reward.

The fact that he scolded one of his students that same evening, saying he shouldn’t praise The Bartered Bride to the skies, had nothing to do with a disregard for the work, for hardly any­ thing annoyed him more than being compared to Offenbach: “None of the gentlemen noticed that I had followed the example of Mozart and his comic opera!” He was only disappointed that his other works, and thus his overall experiment with a new musical style, were not held in the same high regard in Prague, and that The Bartered Bride was erroneously regarded as a folkloristic work: One cannot create a national style simply by imitating the melodic cadence and rhythm of our folk songs; at most the result will be a weak imitation of these very songs, not to mention lacking dramatic truth.

A year earlier, he had come to the sobering realisation of how difficult it had been in his homeland, despite all his efforts, to meet both his own and the audience’s demands over the years.

For most audiences, the desire for rich melodies is synonymous with the wish to hear melodies that they can remember immediately after hearing them for the first

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time and reproduce readily by ear. If they fail to do so, the opera loses its appeal, is condemned and rejected, and the composer with it. For the composer has no opportunity to address another theatre and another audience. And what composer is indifferent to the fate of his work? – I have been forced to realise how poorly educated in music our audience is, despite all the music schools, concerts, operas, and theatres that they enjoy from a young age in a city like Prague. And because it is important to me that each of my works should remain in the repertoire, thereby contributing to the development of Czech style – also alongside other composers who have dabbled a little in national style – I must suppress my own desires when composing and write in a dualism that I actually find odious.

He sent back to Paris a libretto, the realisation of which might have brought him international notice: For now, since I have not yet had the opportunity to present to the public the kind of Czech-Slavic music I envision – Libuše, in which this development can be heard, has not yet been performed – a libretto like Ahasver would be too cosmopolitan for me, since the choruses of Jews and Romans cannot be performed in anything close to the Czech-Slav idiom. [...]

One day, their time will come. [...] I would like to suggest the composers Dvořák and Fibich for Ahasver. Both possess such physical strength that they could easily take on such a difficult task.

It was a high price to pay for his attachment to his homeland. In 1882, it was different when he asked that, as a Czech, he should organize Czech concerts: Or is the Czech public less capable of this? I believe that the Czech nation’s reputation as a musical nation is quite old and well-known, and preserving this rep-

utation, revitalizing it, and elevating it more extensively is the task of every artist who is also inspired by true patriotism. As for me, I am merely making a start.

STRANGER IN HIS HOMELAND Of course, he cherishes memories of another day of celebration: the day the foundation stone for the new National Theatre was laid on 16 May 1868, a spectacle with a festive procession, a beer tent on the Vltava River, flags, and traditional costumes. Smetana also came in traditional costume and exclaimed “In Music is the Life of the Czechs” as the stone was laid. The newspapers reported: A major flurry of enthusiasm [...]

People and things were transformed [...] The laying of the foundation stone culminated in the words: In the name of the people united in Bohemia and Moravia, may God bless the work of this refuge.

Prague finally celebrated this memorable day with Smetana’s opera Dalibor, which premièred in the New Town Theatre, the city’s largest venue with some 4,000 seats. This was preceded by a public dress rehearsal, a highly unusual event at the time. Word had already spread among the audience at this rehearsal that the piece would probably not win the hearts of the audience, at least not during Smetana’s lifetime. And so it turned out – Dalibor saw very few performances. For Smetana, this was the greatest artistic disappointment of his life, while The Bartered Bride, after a rather unfortunate première, soon proved to have catchy melodies for Czech audiences, so much so that the opera director Mayr, who was otherwise hostile towards Smetana, had a

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poster put up the day after the successful 100th performance: “By public demand, the second 100th performance of The Bartered Bride.” Smetana did not profit much from this, because in order to have his five operas performed at all, he had made all five available to the new theatre free of royalties – a patriotic luxury he could ill afford financially.

In 1872, his opponents tried hard to depose him, publishing diatribes accusing him of being a poor conductor, conducting very little, lacking energy as an opera director, discouraging opera, standing in the way of younger composers, and preventing their works from being performed. That same year, Czech musicians, among them Antonín Dvořák, issued a petition demanding that Smetana, without whom serious dramatic music in Prague would be unthinkable, retain his position despite all attacks from hostile critics and behindthe-scenes intrigues. The opera composers of this group even openly threatened not to make their works available to a less competent successor.

His desire to popularize nationalism also drew criticism from abroad: the feared Eduard Hanslick spoke of “patriotically exaggerated clamour that would pass off the Moldau whirlpool as a second Niagara Falls.” Dvořák later adopted Smetana’s hope for a “Slavic” music of some kind with much more distance: Let us hope that nations that have and represent art will never perish, however small they may be!

But then tragedy struck: in 1874, while out walking, Smetana experienced acoustic hallucinations, severe tinnitus, and quickly became completely deaf – a condition that now precipitated his fall from power. Smet-

ana was forced to relinquish his position, move to the countryside with his daughter, and from then on had to beg for what little he was entitled to from the new authorities – who were all his old enemies – even for tickets to performances of his works.

Earning a living from teaching was also out of the question, and after a period of extensive practice he abandoned his absurd emergency plan of performing as a pianist again. At the same time, he was unwilling to make compromises with the sale of his works abroad – primarily in German-speaking countries, but also in France – and to publishers the moment he was requested to make changes and make allowances for public taste. The situation was paradoxical: Smetana – revered by many as the dazzling epitome of the new Czechness – impoverished, and lonely.

TORTURE. ”BUT NO TRUE KAKANIAN COULD BEAR IT IN KAKANIA.” In politically charged situations, it is not good for artists to allow themselves to be harnessed to a political cart.

Smetana, torn in his patriotism between conservative and innovative forces, had to learn the hard way that his mythologizing as a national artist and, before that his cultural-political commitment, had done him little good. He was unable to witness the triumph of his Bartered Bride, which had just begun in the city of Vienna so hated by nationalists yet so close by, nor any of the many subsequent performances, which – ironically – were mostly performed in German.

In Prague, the thoroughly patriotic Smetana was controversial; he consid-

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ered himself aligned politically with the more progressive Young Czechs and aesthetically with the Wagnerians, who were hostile to the Old Czechs and who desired a reactionary folklore, was controversial. This he was revered by some and despised by others. Intrigues were waged against him, he was accused of being involved in the national music scene for purely self-serving reasons, putting down and abusing Czech opera as a “handmaiden of personal interests.” Personal and political, artistic and ideological, merged in a fatal dispute that dragged on for many years and did not shrink from mocking his illness.

Believe me, he wrote in 1880, I must summon all my courage and strength to avoid succumbing to despair and violently ending my suffering! Only the thought of my family and the knowledge that I must continue to work for my people and fatherland keeps me alive and spurs me on to new work.

When he died after a period of derangement, his funeral procession resembled a demonstration; in the Heden, people spoke of the pride of the Czech people, but also of sacrificing Czech circumstances, and that evening The Bartered Bride was performed at the National Opera. His compatriot Karl Kraus asked in his obituary: Has torture been abolished in Austria? Genius can still be tortured to death.

Where all can see it. Smetana was tortured until he died of madness. His crime?

Progress. Smetana’s life was a slow death by starvation. When he certainly could no longer hear, he was called the Mozart of our time. How comforting it is to lie among those other boards that no longer mean the world!

Smetana was one of the first to feel abandoned by Prague, which could have

been enriched precisely because of the influence of Czech, Jewish, and Austrian traditions and their combination, duplications, and interferences, but it had chosen a different path – a city that became even more of a place of no return for many artists from 1880 onward.

It is no coincidence that two complementary Prague citizens from literature were led across the Charles Bridge to their execution shortly afterwards: Josef K. in the moonlight by two men dressed in black, Josef Švejk by two soldiers at dawn. Their authors, both the same age, did not know each other, for they lived in two different worlds, albeit in the same city: Franz Kafka in the German-speaking world, Jaroslav Hašek in the Czech one. And yet, the fates of their characters resemble each other in a grotesquely alienated, tragically burlesque way.

Franz Werfel, a lifelong major messenger for Czech culture, answered the question of why he left Prague by saying it was a semi-subconscious instinct to save himself. Franz Kafka felt strangled by its claws, František Halas wrote of the city’s bone-gnawing history, Gustav Meyrink of the atmosphere of hatred and, like Smetana, experiences his own ambivalence: There is no city in the world that one would like to turn one’s back on as much as Prague, when one is living there; but also none that one longs for quite as ardently once one has left it.

The fact that Smetana’s works remained unknown outside Bohemia for nearly a quarter of a century puzzled both the media and the public. This was most probably due to the Prague intrigues that placed Smetana’s opponents in key positions after his retirement due to increasing hearing loss,

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and to the composer’s penury; with his fatal illness and deafness, he was less and less able to cope with confrontations, even positive ones.

And yet, Smetana was driven by conflicting and sometimes mutually exclusive motives. The social situation in Prague also shaped Smetana as a composer; partly out of conviction, partly out of desperation that he had to make compromises because of it, he wanted to stay in Prague. As much as he suffered, his artistic development, his career, and the development of the Czech nation cannot be separated from one another – and this is his tragedy. Without it, he would not have become a world-famous composer, even posthumously.

POSTHUMOUS REDEMPTION. ”THE CZECHS HAVE STOLEN THE SHOW!” This was the unanimous opinion of the press following the Prague National Theatre’s guest performance at the 1891 Vienna Exhibition, commemorating the 100th anniversary of Mozart’s death. The net profits were to be donated to humanitarian causes – a major affair for which a new 1,500-seat theatre and a 2,200-seat concert hall were built specifically. While the exhibition failed to generate any financial benefit, its significance as an international music and theatre festival extended far beyond the borders of the Danube Monarchy. “Tout Vienne” also attended the Czech premières, and famous individuals such as Prince Lobkowitz and Princess Metternich had previously requested the participation of Bohemian theatres. This was initially criticised back home in Prague: “We are preparing for conflict with Vienna, and you want to present a

comedy for our enemies?” But in light of Smetana’s success, even his adversaries had to admit that this comedy had also been a political success.

Smetana, not exactly welcomed

by Prague, is perceived in Vienna as a composer’s gem – of course, an Austrian one: Is Vienna separated from Prague by a Great Wall of China? the press wrote maliciously. We want to hear everything Smetana has given to his ungrateful fatherland! We have all slept through the work of one of our fatherland’s noblest artists! All of Austria should have gladly made up the losses from the music and theatre exhibition, since one of its best sons, a master who now carries the fame of Austrian art to all countries of the world, has been restored to the country!

In 1893, the Theater an der Wien performed a German version of The Bartered Bride, and passages became familiar to every household. Budapest, Chicago, and Berlin followed in the same year, then Munich. Even Hanslick praised it: This music is natural, modest, and unaffected throughout, falling neither into the pathos of grand opera nor into the trivialities of farce, never sacrificing the singing to the orchestra, never sacrificing the musical form to one-sided dramatic pretensions. These negative virtues, in the broadest sense, which I value extremely highly, are more valuable than ever today. Our audiences have almost forgotten how to enjoy naive grace and naturalness in opera. For those who have endured for years only the blows of “highly dramatic” effects and the pinpricks of “witty” refinements, the music for The Bartered Bride refreshes them like a cool bath.

When Smetana’s compatriot Gustav Mahler took over the Court Opera

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in 1897, he presented Dalibor in German as the first new work, having included The Bartered Bride while at his previous position in Hamburg. The subsequent development: The première of The Bartered Bride is certainly one of the most significant and glorious premières of the MahlerPollini era [...]. In Hamburg, our Bartered Bride was just as successful as the sold-out Bride, for it soon became a welcome box office hit.

The failed première of The Bartered Bride in front of a half-empty theatre – half the Prague audience, panicking about the Prussian army marching toward Königgrätz, preferred to stay home while the other half participated in excursions organised by Czech societies for that very day – and the cancelled first foreign performance at the Paris Opéra-Comique in 1869 were forgotten. Until 1918, The Bartered Bride actually gave the Czechs visibility, albeit belatedly, like all the works by Smetana and Dvořák, which had been performed abroad with increasing success since 1892. Further, this happened not with enthusiastic support from their political homeland, but rather from precisely those against whom the Czech nationalists wanted to distance themselves: the audience and the cultural luminaries of Vienna.

Smetana’s wish was that, as with Mozart, people would one day be able to declare after a few bars “This is Smetana” did come true after all, but only because music, unlike politics, ultimately refuses to be forced under the yoke of pure nationality.

”IF YOU WILL: THE MOST WAGNERIAN COMIC OPERA” The Bartered Bride is about the life of the Czech people – not in the golden city of Prague, but in a small village, at that time already in a romanticised, nostalgic retrospective. No wonder the opera began to enjoy rapid success when the outbreak of the First World War was imminent and the signs of collapse of the Danube Monarchy had become unbearable. No wonder, either, that Smetana, the founder of a Czech musical aesthetic, was now being hailed as an Austrian composer.

And yet there is a hint that this could be a travesty, the travesty of a town that wants to feel like a village: a Czech community, urban and bourgeois, in borrowed rural garb, an island in the midst of a fragile social fabric where rules only appear to be correct. What village life! The choir sings of happiness, but for the boys, happiness probably looks different. Hans, the exiled son, returns home and does not want to show himself, not even to his beloved, perhaps because he still distrusts her, or perhaps because the rift with his parents can no longer be healed. Wenzel, his brother, has nothing more than a speech impediment and is mocked by everyone, bullied by his parents, and even demoted to dancing bear by the traveling circus.

Marie longs for love that transcends boundaries, but out of pragmatism, she is too quick to bow to the dictates of the older generation.

And the eloquent matchmaker, unable to see through the deal’s resolution, ultimately almost fears for his life, becoming the victim of the village mob. Everyone is under pressure: the progressive young people and the

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traditionalist parents; nothing can happen in secret; everything is public and simultaneously publicly judged – and condemned. The sense of security within a rural order is only apparent – the ​​ constraints, the threats, the exposure are all too obvious for those who dream of their own private, free happiness – be it a few more guilders in their pockets or a loved one. The message: the happiness that the chorus so overwhelmingly praises means something different to each person, even in a small village. And it is always at risk. The ending, however jubilant it may appear, is only a snapshot. At this moment, no one really wants to know what life will bring afterwards.

In the crucial third act, before the questionable happy ending, a traveling circus appears, hardly surpassed in its magnificent misery, featuring a fake Spanish dancer, famous for her daring escapades, a fake Native American imported from Tahiti near Panama, and a fake bear from Alaska – multiple identities on stage, too, reducing doggedly

conducted nationality debates to absurdity. Esmeralda’s wise advice to the desperate Wenceslas when asked what he should do: Dance! It’s no coincidence that she shares the same name as the alleged inventor of the original Czech polka, whose history is, in fact, a false one, being a re-import of a salon dance from Vienna. “Just believe us, you’ll love it with us,” says the director of the circus troupe.

“For freedom is the highest priority for all free artists. Indeed, the comedian class is the class of all classes! For people are, after all, comedians through and through.

And the difference is that they rarely play the comedy as well as we do in costume.”

The reality of life is the stage, every­ thing else: theatre, sometimes comedy, sometimes tragedy. Perhaps that was Smetana’s and Sabina’s political and worldly-wise manifesto? And so we surmise with Musil: Yes, despite much to the contrary, Kakania may have been a land of geniuses after all; and that’s probably why it perished.

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IMPRINT BEDŘICH SMETANA

THE BARTERED BRIDE SEASON 2025/26 PREMIÈRE OF THE PRODUCTION 28 SEPTEMBER 2025 Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV General Editor SERGIO MORABITO Design & concept EXEX Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER Cover image concept MARTIN CONRADS, BERLIN Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU ARTICLE ORIGINATION Synopsis and interview with Dirk Schmeding, Robert Schweer and Alfred Mayerhofer: On the fence between two worlds

by Sergio Morabito are original contributions – Étienne Barilier: The return of Mozart to Prague, programme booklet of Opéra de Paris, 2008 – Lydia Rea Hartl: On the fence, between two worlds, from: Die verkaufte Braut, programme booklet of the Bavarian State Opera 2018. IMAGE REFERENCES Cover image: Louis (Alois) Zwickl (photographer), Alexandrine von Schönerer (1850-1919), circa 1890, Vienna Museum Inv. No. 76622/193, CC0 (https:// sammlung.wienmuseum.at/objekt/469264/). Performance photos: Michael Pöhn/Wiener Staatsoper GmbH ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS Andrew Smith.

Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Holders of rights who were unavailable regarding retrospect compensation are requested to make contact.

produced according to guideline Uz24 Austrian Ecolabel, Print Alliance HAV Produktions GmbH, UW No. 715

INSTEAD OF DANCING SWANS WE FOLLOW SOLID PLANS. STRABAG: Proud supporter of the Vienna State Opera

ERNES, PROJECT LEAD

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