The Importance Of Being Earnest (opera)
''The Importance of Being Earnest'' is a three-act opera by Gerald Barry based on the 1895 play of the same name by Oscar Wilde. The opera was given concert performances in Los Angeles in 2011 and in London and Birmingham in 2012, and received its first fully staged performances in 2013 at the Opéra national de Lorraine, Nancy. Its first British staged performance took place at the Linbury Studio Theatre, Covent Garden, in 2013. Background The opera was commissioned jointly by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Barbican Centre, and was completed by the composer in eight months. Barry himself adapted the libretto from the original play, cutting the text substantially. However, Wilde's plot is retained completely, as well as many of his most famous lines. The composer has commented: "The text was far too long, and I had to cut around two-thirds of it, but the structure is so strong that I think people will hardly notice. I got rid of all the social niceties, which gives a diff ...
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Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) 1889, May 23
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel ''The Picture of Dorian Gray'', and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46. Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. A young Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, Wilde read Literae Humaniores#Greats, Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional Classics, classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde m ...
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