Patience, or Bunthorne’s Bride, is a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. The libretto was written by Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, and the music was composed by Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan. Following The Pirates of Penzance, Patience was their sixth operetta together.
Paitence had its world premiere on April 23, 1881, at Richard D’Oyly Carte’s Opéra Comique in London. Patience had a second opening on 10 October 1881, which was unusual because it was moved to the newly completed Savoy Theatre. However, the second opening was overshadowed by theater accoutrements: the theater was the first to be outfitted with electric lights, which created a lot of buzz.
The opera is a contrast study. Patience, a milkmaid, is wooed by two aesthetic poets with opposing viewpoints. A gang of dragoons tries to wrest control of their lady loves from one of the poets. And, as is customary in Gilbert’s work, there is an older woman, Lady Jane, who serves as a counterpoint to the other women’s youth and beauty.
In Act I of Patience, Bunthorne gives a burlesque of aesthetic doctrine to the twenty love-sick maidens who have abandoned their love of dragoons to follow him. Bunthorne is in love with Patience, who knows nothing about love and has no interest in it. Bunthorne is a sham, pretending to be an aesthete in order to gain attention, unbeknownst to the ladies, dragoons, or Patience. When Grosvenor, a poet and a childhood friend of Patience, appears on the scene, they renew their acquaintance and discover that they are in love. However, according to Patience’s understanding of aesthetic doctrine, it would be too selfish of her to love someone as perfect as Grosvenor, so she must resign herself to loving Bunthorne, which is painful but proper love.
With Bunthorne no longer in the picture, all the maidens fall in love with Grosvenor, who is uninterested in their affections. Bunthorne’s enmity for Grosvenor knows no bounds, and he basically calls him out and threatens to curse him. Grosvenor is content to use compulsion as an excuse to abandon his aesthetic stance. Patience’s conscience allows her to give up Bunthorne and marry Grosvenor because Bunthorne is happier and thus less unpleasant, and Grosvenor is now plain and everyday and thus not perfect. The maidens rejoin the dragoons, and the opera concludes, contrary to the title’s expectations, that no one will “be Bunthorne’s bride.”
Gilbert’s ability to transform his own works from one medium to another was one of his many talents. This is especially true of operas based on material first published in his Bab’s Ballads, such as Patience, which Gilbert created from “The Rival Curates.” Gilbert used the rivals as poets to parody the contemporary cultural phenomenon of aestheticism, which had a significant impact on the arts. In fact, one of the two poets, Nathaniel Bunthorne, has been interpreted as a caricature of the aesthete Oscar Wilde, though some believe Bunthorne is a composite figure.