An Operatic Locarno: The Paris Premiere of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and Czechoslovak-French Cultural Diplomacy

Abstract

AbstractOn 26 October 1928 Paris was witness to a gala opera performance some sixty years in the making: the city’s first staging of Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1866). Organised under the auspices of the Czechoslovak embassy, joined with the tenth anniversary celebrations for the foundation of the First Czechoslovak Republic, and promoted as a marker of French-Czechoslovak cultural ties, the event constituted a triumph for Czech opera in one of the interwar period’s most important European cultural centres. The Paris premiere of The Bartered Bride allows for a detailed examination of two distinct but interconnected issues: the status of Smetana’s opera as political, ideological and national symbol for the nascent Czechoslovak state, and the diplomatic relationship between interwar France and Czechoslovakia.