Patience; or, Bunthorne's Bride, is a comic opera in two acts with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. The opera is a satire on the aesthetic movement of the 1870s and '80s in England and, more broadly, on fads, superficiality, vanity, hypocrisy and pretentiousness; it also satirises romantic love, rural simplicity and military bluster.
First performed at the Opera Comique, London, on 23 April 1881, Patience moved to the 1,292-seat Savoy Theatre on 10 October 1881, where it was the first theatrical production in the world to be lit entirely by electric light. Henceforth, the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas would be known as the Savoy Operas, and both fans and performers of Gilbert and Sullivan would come to be known as "Savoyards."
Patience was the sixth operatic collaboration of fourteen between Gilbert and Sullivan. It ran for a total of 578 performances, which was seven more than the authors' earlier work, H.M.S. Pinafore, and the second longest run of any work of musical theatre up to that time, after the operetta Les Cloches de Corneville.Les Cloches de Corneville was the longest-running work of musical theatre in history, until Dorothy in 1886. See this article on longest runs in the theatre up to 1920
Background
The opera is a satire on the aesthetic movement of the 1870s and '80s in England, part of the 19th-century European movement that emphasised aesthetic values over moral or social themes in literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design. Called "Art for Art's Sake", the movement valued its ideals of beauty above any pragmatic concerns.Smith, Steve. "A Satire With Targets Not So Well Remembered", The New York Times, 5 January 2014 Although the output of poets, painters and designers was prolific, some argued that the movement's art, poetry and fashion was empty and self-indulgent.Fargis, p. 261Denney, p. 38 That the movement was so popular and also so easy to ridicule as a meaningless fad helped make Patience a big hit. The same factors made a hit out of The Colonel, a play by F. C. Burnand based partly on the satiric cartoons of George du Maurier in Punch magazine. The Colonel beat Patience to the stage by several weeks, but Patience outran Burnand's play. According to Burnand's 1904 memoir, Sullivan's friend the composer Frederic Clay leaked to Burnand the information that Gilbert and Sullivan were working on an "æsthetic subject", and so Burnand raced to produce The Colonel before Patience opened.Burnand, p. 165In fact, many stage works prior to 1881 had satirised the aesthetic craze. A review of Patience in The Illustrated London News noted: "By this time the [English] stage is thickly sown all over with a crop of lilies and sunflowers". June 18, 1881, p. 598, discussed and quoted in Williams, pp. 153–54. Modern productions of Patience have sometimes updated the setting of the opera to an analogous era such as the hippie 1960s, making a flower-child poet the rival of a beat poet.Bradley, 2005
The two poets in the opera are given to reciting their own verses aloud, principally to the admiring chorus of rapturous maidens. The style of poetry Bunthorne declaims strongly contrasts with Grosvenor's. The former's, emphatic and obscure, bears a marked resemblance to Swinburne's poetry in its structure, style and heavy use of alliteration.Jones, p. 46; Williams, p. 179 The latter's "idyllic" poetry, simpler and pastoral, echoes elements of Coventry Patmore and William Morris.Jones, pp. 48–52 Gilbert scholar Andrew Crowther comments, "Bunthorne was the creature of Gilbert's brain, not just a caricature of particular Aesthetes, but an original character in his own right."Crowther, Andrew. "Bunthorne and Oscar Wilde", The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, 8 June 2009 The makeup and costume adopted by the first Bunthorne, George Grossmith, used Swinburne's velvet jacket, the painter James McNeill Whistler's hairstyle and monocle, and knee-breeches like those worn by Oscar Wilde and others.
According to Gilbert's biographer Edith Browne, the title character, Patience, was made up and costumed to resemble the subject of a Luke Fildes painting.Browne, p. 93, identifies Fildes's "first successful painting", "Where are you going to, my pretty maid?"; Browne may have meant the Fildes painting of the milk maid "Betty": Image of "Betty" in Thompson, David Croal. The Life & Work of Luke Fildes, R.A., J. S. Virtue & Co. (1895), p. 23 Patience was not the first satire of the aesthetic movement played by Richard D'Oyly Carte's company at the Opera Comique. Grossmith himself had written a sketch in 1876 called Cups and Saucers that was revived as a companion piece to H.M.S. Pinafore in 1878, which was a satire of the blue pottery craze.Cups and Saucers, the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive
A popular misconception holds that the central character of Bunthorne, a "Fleshly Poet," was intended to satirise Oscar Wilde, but this identification is retrospective. According to some authorities, Bunthorne is inspired partly by the poets Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who were considerably more famous than Wilde in early 1881 before Wilde published his first volume of poetry. Rossetti had been attacked for immorality by Robert Buchanan (under the pseudonym "Thomas Maitland") in an article called "The Fleshly School of Poetry", published in The Contemporary Review for October 1871, a decade before Patience.In the essay, Buchanan excoriates Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite school for elevating sensual, physical love to the level of the spiritual. Nonetheless, Wilde's biographer Richard Ellmann suggests that Wilde is a partial model for both Bunthorne and his rival Grosvenor.Ellmann, pp. 135 and 151–52 Carte, the producer of Patience, was also Wilde's booking manager in 1881 as the poet's popularity took off. In 1882, after the New York production of Patience opened, Carte sent Wilde on a yearlong US lecture tour, with his knee breeches, long hair and other idiosyncratic styling, to discuss poetry and the English aesthetic movement, intending to help popularise the show's American touring productions.Cooper, John. "The Lecture Tour of North America 1882", Oscar Wilde in America, retrieved 29 October 2023; and "Oscar Wilde's Lecture", The New York Times, 10 January 1882, p. 5
Although a satire of the aesthetic movement is dated today, fads and hero-worship are evergreen, and "Gilbert's pen was rarely sharper than when he invented Reginald Bunthorne". Gilbert originally conceived Patience as a tale of rivalry between two curates and of the doting women who attended upon them. The plot and even some of the dialogue were lifted straight out of Gilbert's Bab Ballad "The Rival Curates". While writing the libretto, however, Gilbert took note of the criticism he had received for his very mild satire of a clergyman in The Sorcerer, and looked about for an alternative pair of rivals. Some remnants of the Bab Ballad version do survive in the final text of Patience. Lady Jane advises Bunthorne to tell Grosvenor: "Your style is much too sanctified – your cut is too canonical!" Later, Grosvenor agrees to change his lifestyle by saying, "I do it on compulsion!" – the very words used by the Reverend Hopley Porter in the Bab Ballad. Gilbert's selection of aesthetic poet rivals proved to be a fertile subject for topsy-turvy treatment. He both mocks and joins in Buchanan's criticism of what the latter calls the poetic "affectations" of the "fleshly school" – their use of archaic terminology, archaic rhymes, the refrain, and especially their "habit of accenting the last syllable in words which in ordinary speech are accented on the penultimate." All of these poetic devices or "mediaevalism's affectations", as Bunthorne calls them, are parodied in Patience. For example, accenting the last syllable of "lily" and rhyming it with "die" parodies two of these devices at once.Williams, p. 175, discussing the parody of poetic styles in Patience, including Gilbert's satiric use of the poetic devices criticised in Robert Williams Buchanan's essay "The Fleshly School of Poetry", The Contemporary Review, October 1871.
On 10 October 1881, during its original run, Patience transferred to the new Savoy Theatre, the first public building in the world lit entirely by electric light.See this article on the Savoy Theatre from arthurlloyd.co.uk, retrieved 20 July 2007. See also this article from the Ambassador Theatre Group LimitedBurgess, Michael. "Richard D'Oyly Carte", The Savoyard, January 1975, pp. 7–11 Carte explained why he had introduced electric light: "The greatest drawbacks to the enjoyment of the theatrical performances are, undoubtedly, the foul air and heat which pervade all theatres. As everyone knows, each gas-burner consumes as much oxygen as many people, and causes great heat beside. The incandescent lamps consume no oxygen, and cause no perceptible heat.""Richard D'Oyly Carte" , at the Lyric Opera San Diego website, June 2009 When the electrical system was ready for full operation, in December 1881, Carte stepped on stage to demonstrate the safety of the new technology by breaking a glowing lightbulb before the audience.Description of lightbulb experiment in The Times, 28 December 1881
Roles
Colonel Calverley (Officer of Dragoon Guards) (bass-baritone) Major Murgatroyd (Officer of Dragoon Guards) (baritone) Lieut. The Duke of Dunstable (Officer of Dragoon Guards) (tenor) Reginald Bunthorne (a Fleshly Poet) (comic baritone) Archibald Grosvenor (an Idyllic Poet) (lyric baritone) Mr. Bunthorne's Solicitor (silent) The Lady Angela (Rapturous Maiden) (mezzo-soprano) The Lady Saphir (Rapturous Maiden) (mezzo-soprano or soprano) The Lady Ella (Rapturous Maiden) (soprano) The Lady Jane (Rapturous Maiden) (contralto) Patience (a Dairy Maid) (soprano) Chorus of Rapturous Maidens and Officers of Dragoon Guards
Synopsis
Act I
In front of Castle Bunthorne, a group of "lovesick maidens" are all in love with the aesthetic poet Bunthorne ("Twenty lovesick maidens we"). Lady Jane, the oldest and plainest of them, announces that Bunthorne, far from returning their affections, has his heart set on the simple milkmaid Patience. Patience appears and confesses that she has never loved anyone; she is thankful that love has not turned her miserable as it has them ("I cannot tell what this love may be"). Soon, the lovesick maidens' old sweethearts, the 35th Dragoon Guards, appear ("The soldiers of our Queen"), led by Colonel Calverley ("If you Want a Receipt for that Popular Mystery"), Major Murgatroyd, and the ordinary but immensely rich Lieutenant the Duke of Dunstable. They arrive ready to propose marriage, only to discover their intendeds fawning over Bunthorne, who is in the throes of poetical composition, pretending to ignore the attention of the women thronging around him ("In a doleful train"). Bunthorne reads his poem and departs, while the officers are coldly rebuffed and mocked by their former sweethearts, who turn up their noses at the sight of their red and yellow uniforms. The Dragoons, reeling from the insult, depart ("When I first put this uniform on").