Delhi nearly got an Opera House in the late 1930s. The first Vice Chancellor of Delhi University, Sir Maurice Gwyer, was a great lover of Shakespeare’s plays. He named his daughter and a college, after Miranda, from The Tempest . He had wanted the Dance Hall of the Old Viceregal Lodge, built during the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1922, to be converted into an Opera house.
Here, Lord Mountbatten had proposed to Lady Edwina in the same year. But the dream remained unfulfilled and Bengaluru got this distinction.
The Samsung Opera House there, has now been adopted by the South Korean multinational on a 10-year lease from the family of K. Ramakrishnan on condition that the house, spread over 33,000 sq. ft, be preserved in its originality, complete with the mud-tiled roof.
This Opera House is a business hub but with recreational and other facilities. Incidentally, it came up some 40 years after the departure of Winston Churchill from the city where he was posted as a gentleman cadet before moving on to Allahabad and then South Africa during the Boer War.
According to gossip heard in the 1960s in the Civil Lines, an American friend had suggested that Sir Maurice Gwywer stage the musical version of the famous story, The Devil and Daniel Webster as a starter to the proposed opera house.
This masterpiece of American folklore has the legendary lawyer Webster fight a case with the Devil himself. A poor farmer, who had suffered huge losses in natural disasters, exclaimed loudly one desolate evening that he would gladly sell his soul to the Devil himself if his fortunes turned for the better.
Trying on virtual reality devices inside the The Samsung Opera House, on Brigade Road, Bengaluru
Later that evening a man in a black suit visited the farmer’s house and got a deed signed for seven years of good luck, after which his soul would go to the Devil. The man in black was Satan himself. When that period ended, the farmer was greatly perturbed and persuaded Daniel Webster to take up his case, which he did. After an all-night trial, in which the spirits of some of the most notorious characters of American history acted as judge and jury, Webster wins the case.
Sir Maurice was enthused by the story which reminded him of the one written on the same lines by J. F. Fanthome about a Madrasa teacher of Shahjahanpur, on whose behalf some dead luminaries of the town acted as judge and jury. The teacher, Mahfouz, accused of expelling a suspected jinn boy, eventually won the case after a night-long trial in a deserted cemetery.
Unfortunately the opera could not be staged for lack of musicians, though Louis of Bombay House had managed to get some actors, including three girls, Dolly Inglis, Helen Roy and Margaret Hamilton, as the female cast. The Devil’s part was to be played by Henry Brown, an alcoholic, and Peter Pereira, a lawyer, was to act as Daniel Webster.
The Opera originated in Italy towards the close of the 16th century when Akbar was hosting the Jesuit missionaries at Fatehpur Sikri.
They probably told the emperor about the classical Dafne , produced in Florence by Jacop Peri. Akbar was familiar with the Christmas plays staged by the Italian and Portuguese merchants at his court, but a musical opera was something beyond his ken.
However it was during the time of his successors that Henrich Schutz, Jean-Baptiste Lully, and Henry Purcell made their mark as proponents of Opera. This was followed by George Frideric Handel and later Wolfgang Mozart, who had staged his Italian comic operas in the late 18th century.
It is this tradition that was the inspiration for the Bangalore Opera House, some 50 years later. The landmark on Brigade Road was in bad shape and plagued by legal cases that were filed by encroachers who had set up multiple shops inside it. It was then that Samsung stepped in.
The multinational is not averse (like the Aga Khan Trust) to the idea of sponsoring a historical building in Delhi on the same lines. A likely project could be the preservation of Arab Sarai, near Humayun’s Tomb.
The writer is a veteran chronicler of Delhi
