The Bartered Bride the plot [...] is taken from village life and demands a national treatment." According to his biographer John Clapham, Smetana "certainly felt the pulse of the peasantry and knew how to express this in music, yet inevitably he added something of himself." Historian Harold Schonberg argues that "the exoticisms of the Bohemian musical language were not in the Western musical consciousness until Smetana appeared." Smetana's musical language is, on the whole, one of happiness, expressing joy, dancing and festivals. The mood of the entire opera is set by the overture, a concert piece in its own right, which Tyrrell describes
Czech name Czech name Czech names are composed of a given name and a surname. Czechs typically get one given name – additional names may be chosen by themselves upon baptism but they generally use one. With marriage, the bride typically adopts the bridegroom's surname. In the Czech Republic, names are simply known as "jména" ("names") or, if the context requires it, "křestní jména" ("Baptism names"). The singular form is "jméno". Generally, a given name may have Christian roots or traditional Slavic pre-Christian origin (e.g. Milena, Dobromira, Jaroslav, Václav, Vojtěch). In the past, it was common to give only officially recognized names