The Bartered Bride at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater
The New York Times, February 17, 2011

The first full-scale collaboration between the Metropolitan Opera and the Juilliard School, this was both an accomplished production and a plain-old delight. The performance drew a house packed with luminaries, including Mark Morris, Brian Dickie and, naturally, Peter Gelb. There are two more performances on Thursday night and Sunday afternoon; I believe they're both sold out, but you can always take a chance on the stand-by line.

When I set out to write this review, I'd originally intended to quote at least a few lines from J.D. McClatchy's playful translation, which I'd scribbled in the dark but wanted to check against a primary source. A tight deadline, alas, forced me to file before a requested libretto arrived.

But here, at least, is one of my favorite excerpts. These lines come from the terzetto in which the marriage-fixer Kecal describes to Ludmila and Krušina the various virtues of Vašek, the sheltered, stuttering lad to who he intends to wed their daughter, Mařenka:

He's such a fine lad,
and somewhat good-looking.

Altogether out of the ordinary, you'd say.

Voice a bit oddish,
but manners exquisitely modest.

Not grim and gruff-ish.
Diamond in the rough-ish!

In time, Kecal's hard-sell tactics approach the breakaway velocity of a Gilbert & Sullivan patter song:

Temperament reliable, and
virtues undeniable, and…

…income certifiable, and
habits modifable, and…

…defects rectifiable, and
brilliance amplifiable, and…

…assets multipliable, and rivals
all good-bye-able, oh, very justifiable, yes!

Presumably when an expanded version of this Bartered Bride reaches the Met in a season to come — 2014-15, says one authoritative source — the opera will be sung in Czech. Still, I'm glad to have heard the McClatchy translation, and I hope it gets taken up elsewhere.