PATIENCE

  

 

 

 

The Pirates of Penzance had opened on 3 April 1880 and was a great success, so in the summer of 1880 Gilbert began to give thought to the opera which should follow.   At first, he thought of using as a basis one of his Bab Ballads, “The Rival Curates”, but did not want to be thought irreverent if he mocked curates, so turned to rival aesthetes instead and the resulting opera was Patience.   In Patience there are two rival poets, Bunthorne and Grosvenor, who are caricatures of well-known aesthetes of the time.  

 

Arthur Sullivan had arranged to produce a religious work, The Mayor of Antioch, for the Leeds Festival in April 1881, and this held up work on Patience for a while.   The first night of Patience had been arranged for 23 April 1881, but Sullivan only began writing the score with ten days in hand.    Work until 5.00 a.m. on several days was necessary to meet the schedule.  

 

Richard D’Oyly Carte invited Oscar Wilde and James Whistler, two well-known aesthetes, to the first performance.  

 

On 10 October 1881 Patience transferred to the new Savoy Theatre which Richard D’Oyly Carte had built in the Strand.   The Savoy was the first theatre in Britain to be lit by electric light..   Carte went on stage to assure an apprehensive audience that there was no danger from this method of illumination.   The Savoy has its name because it is built on the site of the medieval palace of the Princes of Savoy.

 

Patience ran for 578 performances.