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
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