Patience (opera) - Background

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. 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. This artistic movement was so popular, and also so easy to ridicule as a meaningless fad, that it made 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. 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.

The two poets in the opera are given to reciting their own verses aloud, principally to the admiring chorus of rapturous maidens. The poetry declaimed by Bunthorne is strongly contrasted stylistically with Grosvenor's. The former's, emphatic and obscure, bears a marked resemblance to the poetry of Swinburne in its structure, style and heavy use of alliteration. The latter's, simpler and pastoral, echoes elements of the poetry of Coventry Patmore and William Morris. 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." The makeup and costume adopted by the first Bunthorne, George Grossmith, used the velvet jacket of Swinburne, the hair style and monocle of the painter James McNeill Whistler, and knee-breeches similar to those worn by Oscar Wilde and others.

The title character, Patience, was made up and costumed to exactly resemble the subject of Luke Fildes's first successful picture, "Where are you going to, my pretty maid?" 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.

A popular misconception holds that the central character, Bunthorne, a "Fleshly Poet," was intended to satirise Oscar Wilde. However, this identification is retrospective; in fact, the authors hired Wilde after the American production of Patience opened, to help popularise the opera's touring productions in America. According to some authorities, Bunthorne is based partly on the poets Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who were considerably more famous than Wilde in early 1881, before Wilde's first volume of poetry had been published. Rossetti had been attacked for immorality by Robert Buchanan (under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland) in an article called "The Fleshly School of Poetry", published in The Contemporary Review for October 1871, a decade before Patience. Nonetheless, Wilde's biographer Richard Ellmann suggests that Wilde is a partial model for both Bunthorne and his rival Grosvenor. Carte was also Wilde's booking manager in 1881 as Wilde's popularity took off. In 1882, Carte sent Wilde and his green carnation and knee-breeches to enlighten Americans about the English aesthetic movement. Wilde attended one of the early performances of Patience, with publicity arranged by Helen Lenoir, who would become the second Mrs. D'Oyly Carte.

Gilbert originally conceived Patience as a tale of rivalry between two curates and of the doting ladies 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 "medievalism'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.

During the original run of Patience, on 10 October 1881, the show transferred to the new Savoy Theatre, the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electric light. 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." 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.