The Bartered Bride and the German-language version continues to be played and recorded. A German film of the opera was made in 1932 by Max Ophüls. Until the middle 1850s Bedřich Smetana was known in Prague principally as a teacher, pianist and composer of salon pieces. His failure to achieve wider recognition in the Bohemian capital led him to depart in 1856 for Sweden, where he spent the next five years. During this period he extended his compositional range to large-scale orchestral works in the descriptive style championed by Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. Liszt was Smetana's long-time mentor; he had accepted a
The Bartered Bride Theatre company in Vienna, as part of the Vienna Music and Theatre Exhibition of 1892, where its favourable reception was the beginning of its worldwide popularity among opera audiences. Since the Czech language was not widely spoken, international performances tended to be in German. The United States premiere took place at the Haymarket Theatre, Chicago, on 20 August 1893. The opera was introduced to the Hamburg State Opera in 1894 by Gustav Mahler, then serving as its director; a year later a German company brought a production to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London. In 1897, after his appointment