If New York City did not have its very own Albert Bergeret, we would need to invent — or at least import — him. Since 1974, Mr. Bergeret, the artistic director of the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players, has done yeoman’s work guarding and promoting the peerless operettas and traditions of the English duo for which his company is named. A life without opportunities to hear those witty, wise pieces performed faithfully is not something I care to think about.

The players’ present season, which seems to wax and wane in size as the years go by, included just one of the “big three” operettas it regularly mounts, “The Pirates of Penzance.” (The other two are “H.M.S. Pinafore” and “The Mikado.”) “The Pirates” duly dispatched, the company took its customary turn toward less-familiar fare on Friday night with “Patience,” starting a three-day, four-show run at Symphony Space.

The sixth collaboration of Gilbert and Sullivan, “Patience” was the first stage production ever lit entirely with electricity when it came to London’s newly built Savoy Theater in October 1881, after a premiere at the Opéra Comique in April. A pointed lampoon of the 19th-century Aesthetic movement, which emphasized beauty, taste and refinement over pragmatic and didactic concerns in literature and art, it was the duo’s biggest hit to date.

If the show has not retained its primacy, part of the blame belongs to an increasing unfamiliarity with the targets of its satire: artists like the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and the painter James McNeill Whistler. It’s also fair to say that “Patience” is less richly endowed with indelible musical numbers of the sort that populate the duo’s most famous works.