The Bartered Bride to the Offenbach genre. Smetana was hurt by this remark, which he felt downgraded his opera to operetta status, 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. "The Bartered Bride" was not performed abroad again until after Smetana's death in 1884. It was staged by the Prague National
The Bartered Bride premiere "The Bartered Bride" has entered the repertory of all major opera companies, and is regularly revived worldwide. After several unsuccessful attempts to stage it in France, it was premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1928, sung in French as "La Fiancée vendue". In 2008 the opera was added to the repertoire of the Paris Opera, in a new production staged at the Palais Garnier. In the English-speaking world, recent productions of "The Bartered Bride" in London have included the Royal Opera House (ROH) presentation in 1998, staged at Sadler's Wells during the restoration of the ROH's headquarters at