Savoyards: Patience November 1, 2006

All the well-born young ladies in the village are in love with two contrasting aesthetic poets, one "fleshy" and the other "idyllic," but both the poets are in love with Patience, the simple milkmaid who doesn't care about aesthetics. The military suitors of the young ladies, despite having no interest in aesthetics, decide to try it to win the women's hearts. It is touch and go for a while but everyone ends up with a suitable partner, even if it is only a tulip or a lily! 'Patience,' the sixth Gilbert-Sullivan collaboration, satirizes the aesthetic craze of the 1870s and the '80s when the output of poets, composers and artists was indeed prolific but often argued to be empty and self-indulgent.