Musicologica Olomucensia

Documented, among other sources, by the French music press and French music dictionaries, the slow and belated reception of Smetana’s operas in France is out of step with his reception in the rest of Europe. Sixty-two years after its premiere, The Bartered Bride was the only opera by the composer and the only Czech opera performed in France before the Second World War, the Paris premiere of La Fiancée vendue taking place in 1928 at the Opéra-Comique. Three of Smetana’s other operas were performed in France more than a century after their premiere. As a result, only four of Smetana’s eight operas and a single Dvořák’s opera have been performed in France to the present day, while Janáček’s operas are a little better known and while the operatic output of composers such as Zdeněk Fibich is still unknown in France today. The reception of Smetana’s operas was very poor at the end of the 19th century and often illustrated by simple ignorance. The first years of the 20th century changed the situation somewhat with the publication of the first monograph in French devoted to the composer. It was not until the independence of Czechoslovakia at the end of the First World War, more than thirty years after the composer’s death, that French music critics began to take a real interest in Smetana. While Smetana’s instrumental music is now fairly well known in France, his operatic output has never really made it into the standard repertoire in this country. The language barrier is only one of several explanations for this observation, and it is possible to speculate on the greater reception that Smetana’s operas would have had in France if the composer’s plan to stage The Bartered Bride in Paris in 1869 had been successful.

Keywords: Czech operas; France; Reception; music press; Bedřich Smetana; Antonín Dvořák; Leoš Janáček