Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience

We're back in Gilbert & Sullivan Festival time once again. It's hard to believe that it's now a year since the last Gilbert &S Festival in Buxton.

This year we've chosen a couple of performances, including Patience performed by Peak Opera. We typically choose professional performances by the Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company, but when I discovered that a friend was making his Gilbert &Sullivan  debut in Patience this year, we simply had to go!

Patience is one of my favourite operas. It's very clever and quite subtle, satirising the Aesthetic Movement of late Victorian England. The key figures of the Movement were Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Its central idea was that art should be appreciated for its beauty alone, without needing to serve moral, political, or narrative purposes.

Gilbert's libretto focuses on the absurdity of fads and trends; romantic idealism versus practical love and the conflict between appearance and sincerity. The poet Reginald Bunthorne represents appearance and his rival Archibald Grosvenor sincerity. 

Bunthorne doesn't really believe in the Aesthetic Movement, but pretends to, in order to gain the adoration of women and girls. He is a self-professed "fleshly poet" and one of the best songs on the opera is:

Am I alone, And unobserved? I am! 
Then let me own. I'm an aesthetic sham! 
This air severe. Is but a mere. Veneer!

The words are funny, the music beautiful and the whole opera, a joy!

We all had a really enjoyable evening. Bernie, my G&S friend, and I are really looking forward to our next performance in a couple of weeks.