Name: Patience
Start: 2024-10-06T14:30:00-04:00
End: 2024-10-06T17:00:00-04:00
Location: Greater Pittsburgh Masonic Center

Patience; or, Bunthorne’s Bride, satirizes the aesthetic movement of the 1870s and 1880s. Two rival poets, Reginald Bunthorne and Archibald Grosvenor, vie for the affection of the beautiful dairy maid Patience. Bunthorne is a self-proclaimed aesthetic who attracts the attention of the local maidens, despite secretly being a fraud who loathes the movement. Patience, uninterested in the poets, initially struggles with the concept of true love. She ultimately finds herself drawn to Grosvenor, who is genuinely handsome and charming. Meanwhile, the officers of the Dragoon Guards also desire the attention of the maidens, and go to great lengths to try to woo them. The opera humorously critiques the pretensions of the art world and the fickleness of romantic ideals, ending with a series of romantic resolutions that leave the characters paired off happily.
Patience is Gilbert & Sullivan’s sixth composition as a duo and originally premiered in April of 1881. It was the first opera to be performed at the Savoy Theatre in London (the origin of the term “Savoyard”), which was the first theatre in the world to be lit entirely by electric lighting.