My favorite Gilbert & Sullivan Gilbert & Sullivan is now, officially, Patience. I have listened to it at least four times this spring, and loved it more each time. There’s a chorus toward the end of the first act that I’ve become very fond of, which is saying something, because Patience was the first G&S that I saw at the Jan Hus Playhouse forty years ago, and many, many of its numbers have been favorites for years. But this build-up finale chorus somehow escaped me until now. Here’s the line that I adore:

And never, oh never, our hearts will range
     From that old, old love again!

And then there’s Mary Sansom’s laugh (on the D’Oyly Carte CD) at the end of the reprise of “Twenty Love-Sick Maidens We.” It’s the most beautiful laugh that I have ever heard on a recording — a true silberklang. I burst into tears every time I hear it, just for the joy.

I’ve been devoting my Saturday afternoons to Gilbert & Sullivans, three at a pop, since the weekend after Easter (18-19 April). It’s late in the day to have figured out how to conduct the aural correlative of spring cleaning, but then everything about my lfie these days is of the better-late-than-never sort. I thought I might be at risk of finding Sullivan’s music a trifle outstayed this afternoon; after all, none of the great opera composers has ever occupied my house-tidying Saturdays on a remotely similar scale, even allowing for Ring cycles. But I had a merry time, listening to the line-up of Pinafore (which you’d think I’d know, but I don’t), Utopia, Ltd (’twas my misfortune to be at Bronxville High at the wrong time), and then, once again, Patience.

People often think that the subject of Patience‘s satire  is Oscar Wilde, but Wilde was hardly on the scene in 1881 (Except, as I just found out, to the extent that Richard D’Oyly Carte put him on it, as a publicist!). In fact, Reginald Bunthorne is a take-off on James McNeil Whistler, who, unlike Wilde, liked girls. (I doubt very much that Gilbert would have touched Oscar Wilde, in any sense of the word.) An important distinction, all in all. I mean, you wouldn’t have heard Wilde confessing to a catamite, “Well, between you and me, I don’t like poetry.” In any case, you wouldn’t have believed him.

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