Smetana had to learn Czech and needed a crib in German to help him set (rather eccentrically) the libretto of his famous comic opera. For those reasons alone the work has enjoyed a kind of double national status in central Europe – even spreading to Britain where “international” performances (like the erratically cast pre-war Beecham one on Somm) were once given auf Deutsch. The present historical offering from almost 50 years ago uses the well travelled but relentlessly unpoetic translation by Kurt Honolka. It tends to beat Karel Sabina’s gentler ironies and sorrows into heavy Lortzing-style humour with Bock-sized handles.

Likewise the performance. The “star” men (Kmentt’s Hans=Jeník and Czerwenka’s Kecal) and the old men (Braun’s and Welter’s peasant dads, Szemere’s over-the-big-top circus director) are as free with their notes as Honolka’s German is with Smetana’s. Kmentt can be beautiful alongside Seefried’s gorgeous Marie=Marenka and downright crude bartering with Kecal for his marriage dowry. The old women may be no less than Hilde Konetzni and Rosette Anday – a previous generation’s Wagner, Strauss and Bizet heroines – but it’s already 1960 and we need to be seeing them (over)act as well as hearing them cackle.

The orchestra and Klobucar are uneven. They start well. A Vienna State Opera regular (1133 performances in 56 operas), the von Matacic´-trained Croatian maestro knows how to weight Smetana’s sometimes Germanic scoring more towards Liszt than Brahms. He’s less happy in the dances, while in Act 3 he, the orchestra and the Austrian radio engineers have some less than concentrated quarts d’heure. A mixed bag, then, that I wish could have been an old telecast for period fun. Kempe (EMI, recently reissued) shows that you can be poetic with the German text and has Fritz Wunderlich, Pilar Lorengar and Gottlob Frick to help him. For a “best” Prodaná nevesta in Czech don’t miss Naxos’s takeover of the 1933 Ostrcil recording (sound very OK). But, huge but, Irmgard Seefried would be the greatest interpretative Marenka on disc if she was singing the role in Martian – she even finds a special voice for the Act 2 duet when she tries putting Vasek off marriage.