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 Bartered Bride as director of the Vienna State Opera, Mahler brought "The Bartered Bride" into the Vienna repertory, and conducted regular performances of the work between 1899 and 1907. Mahler's enthusiasm for the work was such that he had incorporated a quote from the overture into the final movement of his First Symphony (1888). When he became Director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1907 he added the opera to its repertory. The New York premiere, again in German, took place on 19 February 1909, and was warmly received. "The New York Times" commented on the excellence of the staging