Can A Raging Avant-Gardist Compose A Proper Oscar Wilde Opera? (Absolutely.)

Mark Swed writes that Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest “is hysterically funny. The score is highly sophisticated and indescribably zany. … The world now has something rare: a new genuinely comic opera and maybe the most inventive Oscar Wilde opera since Richard Strauss’ Salome more than a century ago.”