# Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest streamed on YouTube



## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

In cooperation with YouTube, the Royal Opera House did a live stream of Gerald Barry's hilarious opera _The Importance of Being Earnest _from the Barbican Theatre in London on April 2nd.

_"Barry's hyperactive score runs helter-skelter through numerous musical languages - everything from serialist pastiche to galumphing concerto grosso gets a look in, riveted through with increasingly giddy variations on 'Auld Lang Syne'. From the basso profundo Lady Bracknell's spluttered Beethovenian Schiller to Gwendolen and Cecily's Sprechstimme battle of spite through megaphones to the accompaniment of 40 solemnly smashed plates, The Importance of Being Earnest is insanely virtuoso, brilliantly hilarious and packed with invention."_






There is one exchange which I must quote here 

Jack: That is the whole truth, pure and simple.
Chorus: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature, a complete impossibility.


----------



## Bellinilover (Jul 24, 2013)

I'd never heard of this opera before! It is one of my favorite plays, though. Thanks.


----------



## nina foresti (Mar 11, 2014)

Being my very favorite comedy play I was so looking forward to this opera.
Is it blasphemous for me to say that I simply could not cotton to it? (Please hold your rotten tomatoes. I'm leaving...)


----------

