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 Bride of Abydos his "Bride of Abydos" at the age of twenty-six on 2 December 1813. In a letter to a friend, he himself notes the nature of its composition "for the sake of employment". In his personal Diary of 16 November 1813, Byron claims to have written "The Bride" "stans pede in uno" (a direct quotation from Horace's Satires 2.10, decrying the rapid production of poor verse for commercial gain). Byron, however hastily he wrote, return and revised many times "The Bride", nevertheless, the manuscript tradition reveals only minor tweaks to the poem. In another letter Byron expresses his intent to concoct