Provisional Theatre (Prague) bias in favour of Italian opera was replaced by Smetana's more balanced repertoire, which mixed Italian, German and French pieces with such Slavonic and Czech works as he could find. Apart from his own compositions ("The Bartered Bride", "The Brandenburgers in Bohemia" and "Dalibor", Smetana introduced works by the Czech composers Lepold Eugen Měchura and Josef Rozkošný, but was nevertheless attacked by some parts of the music establishment for giving insufficient encouragement to native talent. Efforts to remove him from his post, and to reinstate Maýr, were unsuccessful. Smetana was responsible for the establishment of an independent school attached to
The Cunning Peasant The Cunning Peasant The Cunning Peasant ("Šelma sedlák" in Czech) is an opera by Antonín Dvořák. The Czech-language libretto is by Josef Otakar Veselý. "The Cunning Peasant" was written at a time when there was a lack of high-quality Czech dramatic writers. In his 1995 notes to the Supraphon recording, Milan Pospíšil indicates that Veselý did not solve that problem. His libretto demonstrates talent but also uncritical self-confidence and recycles traditional plot elements and even the names of characters. Both Jeník and Václav, for example, are based on models with similar names in "The Bartered Bride". The influence of the