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 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