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
Karel Svoboda (composer) in the garden of his villa at Jevany on January 28, 2007. It is believed that he committed suicide. Karel Svoboda (composer) Karel Svoboda (19 December 1938 – 28 January 2007) was a Czech composer of popular music. He wrote music for many TV series in the 1970s. Karel Svoboda was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now in the Czech Republic) and began his career as a pop composer after abandoning medicine in his third year of university. He became a member of the rock band "Mefisto" in 1963 where he played piano. Later, he composed music for the "Laterna Magica"