A musical drama based on the ballad by K. J. Erben.
Antonín Dvořák. In 1853, Karel Jaromír Erben published the ballad The Wedding Shirt as part of his famous collection The Garland (Kytice), which is a well-known and inseparable part of Czech culture. 32 years later, Antonín Dvořák brilliantly transformed it into an impressive cantata, full of lovely duets and powerful choral passages, in which he sought adequate musical means to express deep longing, dramatic tension, and pure love while consistently respecting the rhythm of the Czech language. This created a complex work that far exceeded the national revivalist limits of Erben's work. In 2026, the DFXŠ opera ensemble will present The Wedding Shirt as a unique scenic work, full of deep human desires for a life in love and the related inner conflicts that always arise when we fall in love with the wrong person, as happens in The Wedding Shirt to the Girl and the Dead Man. Finding a way out of one's own blindness and looking beyond the horizon is possible thanks to a conscious rediscovery of one's own self and faith in God or in oneself. The production uses smoke effects and includes a gunshot. The opera is performed in the Czech original with Czech and German subtitles.