The Secret (opera)

The Secret
Opera by Bedřich Smetana
The composer before 1880
Native title	Tajemství
Librettist	Eliška Krásnohorská
Language	Czech
Premiere	7 November 1878 (1878-11-07) Nové České Divadlo, Prague

The Secret (Czech: Tajemství) is a comic opera in three acts by Bedřich Smetana. The libretto was written by Eliška Krásnohorská. The premiere took place on 18 September 1878 at the Nové České Divadlo (New Czech Theatre) in Prague.

Krásnohorská proposed the idea for a new opera to Smetana two weeks after the opening of The Kiss, but kept details of the plot a secret from the composer until July 1877, when a draft outline, drawing on several sources, including Les femmes et le secret by La Fontaine, was sent to him. The librettist had set the action in the small town of Bĕlá in the Bezdĕz mountains, visible from Smetana's home in the country. Fighting his increasing deafness and resultant depression, Smetana made a few small changes to Krásnohorská's original draft and delivered a full score to the New Czech Theatre on 4 August 1877, for the premiere in September. The through composition evident in The Brandenburgers in Bohemia and Libuše is absent; a pot-pourri overture prefaces a sequence of choruses, duets, arias and ensemble pieces, but the characters are portrayed with more feeling and drawn from life, rather than the more stock characters of The Bartered Bride and The Two Widows.

The opera was not as successful as Smetana had hoped; after its opening run, it was seen only a dozen more times during his lifetime and was unperformed for twenty years after that. In 1922 it came back into the repertory of the Prague National Theatre.

The UK premiere was in Oxford in 1955 under Jack Westrup, and it was performed at the Camden Festival in 1972 under Vilém Tauský.

Twenty years before, Councillor Kalina had asked for the hand of Róza Malinova who turned him down because of his lack of wealth. Kalina then married a woman of similar status. Róza never married and regrets having rejected Kalina.