The second and most successful of the Czech composer Bohuslav Foerster’s six operas, Eva, first staged in 1899, is a portrait of social conflict. It deals with the unhappy love of the socially respectable yet ultimately scandalous farmer’s wife, Eva, who leaves her husband, lives with another man, is refused a divorce and drowns herself in the Danube. Foerster described his task as ‘to stress the lyrical and dramatic moments, to capture the individual characters and plot in their psychological veracity’. Though Foerster was a nationalist, and for many years a worthy successor to Smetana, Eva is worlds apart from the tradition from which it derives. In Eva, country life is harsh, and economic disparities set insuperable obstacles to human feelings, leading inevitably to tragic decline.