Gerald Barry (born 28 April 1952) is an Irish composer.[1]
Gerald Barry was born in Clarehill, Clarecastle, County Clare, in the Republic of Ireland. He was educated at St. Flannan's College, Ennis, County Clare. He went on to studied music at University College Dublin, in Amsterdam with Peter Schat, in Cologne with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel, and in Vienna with Friedrich Cerha.[2] Barry taught at University College Cork from 1982 to 1986. Growing up in rural Clare, he had little exposure to music except through the radio: "The thing that was the lightning flash for me, in terms of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, would have been an aria from a Handel opera, from Xerxes maybe, that I heard on the radio. I heard this woman singing this, and bang – my head went. And that was how I discovered music."[3]
"Barry's is a world of sharp edges, of precisely defined yet utterly unpredictable musical objects. His music sounds like no one else's in its diamond-like hardness, its humour, and sometimes, its violence."[4] He often conceives of material independently of its instrumental medium, recycling ideas from piece to piece, as in the reworking of Triorchic Blues from a violin to a piano piece to an aria for countertenor in his television opera The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit:
It seemed to me unprecedented: the combination of the ferociously objective treatment of the material and the intense passion of the working-out, and both at an extreme of brilliance. And the harmony – that there was harmony at all, and that it was so beautiful and lapidary. It functions, again, irrationally, but powerfully, to build tension and to create structure. It wasn't just repetitive. It builds. And the virtuosity, the display of it, that combination of things seemed, to me, to be new, and a major way forward.[5]
His most recent opera, The Importance of Being Earnest, has become a huge success after its world premiere at Los Angeles and European premiere at the Barbican, London.[6][7] A critic comments:
He writes "what he likes" in the way Strindberg does, not trying to characterise his characters, but letting them perform his own specialities, a kind of platform for his own musical specialities. As in Strindberg where you feel every sentence stands for itself and the characters are sort of borrowed for the use of saying them (borrowed to flesh out the text, rather than the other way round), that they've been out for the day. In Gerald's opera the whole apparatus – for that's what it is – takes on a kind of surrealistic shape, like one person's torso on someone else's legs being forced to walk, half the characters in the opera and half the composer.[8]
The Importance of being Earnest was awarded the Royal Philhamonic Society Prize for Large Scale Composition in 2013.
In 2022 the Berlin Philharmonic commissioned Aus Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant, a double bass concerto based on Act 2 from Petra, premiered in Berlin in June 2022, played by Matthew Mcdonald and conducted by John Storgards.
In September 2022 the Berlin Philharmonic played Barry’s orchestral piece, Chevaux de frise, conducted by Thomas Adès.
Barry’s Kafka’s Earplugs was premiered at the 2023 BBC Proms with the BBC Philharmonic conducted by John Storgards.
The Intelligence Park (1981–8)[9]
Libretto by Vincent Deane, was commissioned by the London Institute of Contemporary Arts and premiered at the 1990 Ameida Opera Festival staged by David Fielding, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and recorded on NMC Recordings. It was subsequently seen at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, The Irish Museum of Modern Art and in a new staging by Nigel Lowery at the Royal Opera House Linbury Theatre in 2019. The libretto was translated into German by Harald Beck.
The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit (1991–92)[10]
With a libretto by Meredith Oakes, it was commissioned by Channel 4 Television with the Composers Ensemble conducted by Diego Masson. It was staged at the 2002 Aldeburgh Festival by Nigel Lowery, conducted by Thomas Adès, and toured to the London Almeida Festival and the Berliner Festwochen. Concert performances followed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in New York and in Radio France, Paris. In 2013 it was staged at the Badisches Staatsthater Karlsruhe by Sam Brown.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (2001-4)
To the text by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the opera received its first staging in 2005 at English National Opera directed by Richard Jones and was revived in 2007 at Theater Basel. It was done in concert in 2005 by the NSO in Dublin.
Acts 1, 3 and 4 were the basis of Barry’s Piano Concerto commissioned by Musica Viva, Munich, and performed by Nicholas Hodges and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Peter Rundel. In 2022 the Berlin Philharmonic commissioned a version of Act 2 as a Double Bass concerto played by Matthew McDonald and conducted by John Storgards.
La Plus Forte (2007)
To the text by Strindberg, this one woman opera was commissioned by Radio France for the 2007 Festival Présence in Paris and sung by Barbara Hannigan with the CBSO conducted by Thomas Adès. It was subsequently done in Miami, Dublin, London, Toronto, Amsterdam and Porvoo. The English language version was premiered in 2019 in Amsterdam by Kerstin Avemo and The Concertgebouw Orchestra with Thomas Adès. It will be recorded by the BBC Concert Orchestra in 2024 at Alexandra Palace, London, and semi staged at Nouvel Opéra Fribourg in 2024 with Alison Scherzer, soprano, and conducted by Jerome Kuhn.
The Importance of Being Earnest (2010)[11]
To a libretto by Gerald Barry based on Oscar Wilde’s text, it was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Barbican. After concert performances with Thomas Adès in Los Angeles, London and Birmingham, it was staged at Opéra Nationale de Lorraine-Nancy by Sam Brown and broadcast on France Musique, in Belfast and Dublin by Northen Irish Opera and Irish National Opera staged by Antony McDonald, at Nouvel Opéra Fribourg and Théâtre de L’Athénée, Paris, by Julien Chavaz, conducted by Jerome Kuhn, and the Royal Opera House Linbury Theatre by Ramin Gray. This production travelled to the Lincoln Center, New York, with the New York Philharmonic and Ilan Volkov.
It was awarded the Royal Philhamonic Society Prize for Large Scale Composition in 2013. The NMC recording was nominated for a Grammy Award.
Alice's Adventures Under Ground (2014/15)
To a libretto by Gerald Barry based on the Lewis Carrol text, Alice was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Barbican Centre and Britten Sinfonia. It was performed in concert in Los Angeles, London and Dublin, and received its world premiere staging by Antony McDonald at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 2020, conducted by Thomas Adés and Finnegan Downy Dear. This staging was filmed by Irish National Opera and released on Signum Classics, with the Irish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Andre de Ridder. It was staged at Theater Magdeburg in 2022 by Julien Chavaz and conducted by Jerome Kuhn.
Salome (2017)
To a libretto by Gerald Barry based on Oscar Wilde's text, it was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, and Southbank Centre London. The LA premiere was postponed because of COVID-19 and it is planned to be performed in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Thomas Adés in 2026 and staged in 2026 by Julien Chavaz at Theater Magdeburg.
Opera is what it always was and will be. Nothing is ever in crisis. The only things that are ever in crisis are the people who use the forms. If there’s ever any weakness in anything, it’s the author’s fault. People who speak of the death of things talk rubbish. Everything remains the same. Everything is always the same. Nothing changes. All there are, are different levels of imagination, and that has always been the case. There is no advance imaginatively from Piero della Francesca to Wagner. They are both at the highest level and are therefore both the same. That’s all that matters. Any other considerations are footnotes.
Mauricio Kagel, Barry's former teacher chose the piece “_________” (1979) to represent the younger generation at a Musique Vivant concert in Paris conducted by Vinko Globokar. Kagel wrote: "Gerald Barry is always sober, but might as well always be drunk. His piece "_______" is, on the contrary, not rectilineal, but "~~ ~~ ~". [16]
“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.” [17] (Mark Swed - The Los Angeles Times on The Importance of Being Earnest) (2012).[4]
"I've never craved a new work like I have The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (2005) after my first experience of it at the ENO, or wanted to hunt down a CD so quickly. Every second of this work fizzes with a deafening excitement and tension. The music is uncompromising, the singing fiendish and the dramatics a hurtling ball of 1970s melodramatic gaseous material. And I’ve never seen a more beautifully designed set in my life." [18] (Igor Toronyi-Lalic - The Arts Desk)
"Then again the genius of Barry’s “Alice” is how he keeps you completely surprised, amused, bemused, amazed yet also moved without you knowing why. Could it be that by making the absurd Carroll we all know from our childhoods newly absurd, Barry has flipped what was upside down now right side up?" [19] (Mark Swed - The Los Angeles Times on Alice's Adventures Under Ground
"The Intelligence Park is a great, great, great, great, opera." (Michael Finnissy - NMC Recordings)
"If the second half of the 20th century saw opera throttled by existential crises, and left composers wondering whether the only future for the art form was for it to be hung out to dry, or to become an arcane intellectualised annex for the musical games then in vogue, Gerald Barry's one-act opera, La Plus Forte (2007) - receiving its UK premiere in a concert performance last night - marks the end of hostilities. So effortlessly does Barry seem to rise above the tangled, stagnant realities of recent operatic and musical convention, and return and restore the art form to the business of psychological entrapment, that it's hard not to see his small, 20-minute work as one of the most significant operas of the past decade." [20] (Igor Toronyi-Lalic - The Arts Desk)
“Blue Gadoo is one of those cats whose face looks like it’s been bashed flat with a wok. He lives in New York, apparently, and his bulging eyes goggle out from Gerald Barry’s programme note for his new Organ Concerto. Check him out: The Guardian published the full note a day before the performance, which is only right because a Gerald Barry world première really ought to be national news. ‘I saw a photograph of him with a book called Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde,’ explains Barry. ‘By his expression I knew he was mourning the loss of atonality.” [21] (Richard Bratby - The Spectator)
“In his programme note, Barry told us his piece was inspired by memories of snoozing in bed when he should have been playing the organ, and being woken by the angry sacristan. The odd bursts of quaint not-quite-right ecclesiastical harmony were perhaps a memory of hymns, the sudden ear-battering squalls a memory of the sacristan. We also heard the clicking of 21 metronomes and stealthy scales ascending to a region almost beyond hearing – bats in the belfy perhaps? It was riotously silly, occasionally moving, sometimes surreal/sinister, and never dull. The crowd loved it.” [22] (Ivan Hewett - The Telegraph)
It was written in The Irish Times that "no other Irish composer springs to mind who carries the same aura of excitement and originality or whose music means so much to such a wide range of listeners. Certainly, there has been no Irish premiere that has made the impression of The Conquest of Ireland (heard in the festival's opening concert las Wednesday) since Barry's opera The Intelligence Park was seen at the Gate Theatre in 1990".[23] In a 2013 guide to Barry's musical output, Tom Service of The Guardian praised Chevaux-de-frise (1988), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (2005), Lisbon (2006), Beethoven (2008), and The Importance of Being Earnest (2012).[4]
