Opera does not have an obvious home in Delhi. Yet, at the CD Deshmukh Auditorium today, soprano Aastha Mohapatra and pianist Anuvrat Choudhary are betting on the city's appetite for curiosity and the unfamiliar, and that a room of people who don't speak German or Italian might feel something that trained audiences in London take for granted.
Titled Yatra, the one-hour programme covers considerable ground: Schubert, Mahler, Poulenc and Mendelssohn give way to Janáček, Debussy's Clair de Lune, and scenes from Puccini and Verdi. On paper, it is a survey of European classical music spanning two centuries. In practice, the performers describe it as something closer to an argument—that emotion does not require translation, only transmission.
“Yatra is about transcending reality,” Mohapatra says. “These are poems set to music, especially in German Lieder [songs for voice and piano, peaking in the 19th-century Romantic era]. Composers like Mahler or Schubert are always reaching beyond the present moment, towards hope, longing, or something that doesn’t exist yet.”
Bridging the gap
But bringing such a programme to an Indian audience, particularly in Delhi where opera remains a niche form, demands translation beyond language. Much of the repertoire is in German and Italian, languages most listeners will not understand.
Mohapatra, who returned to Delhi from the UK in September 2025, says performing in the city carries a personal significance alongside an artistic one.
That gap, Choudhary argues, is not a barrier but an entry point. “Even if you don’t understand the language, you feel the emotion,” he says. “Music existed like this even centuries ago. People didn’t always understand poetry literally, but they understood what it made them feel.”
Still, context matters. Before each piece, the performers frame the emotional and narrative world of the work—whether it is the playful melancholy of a German folk-inspired Lied or the dramatic intensity of an Italian aria, a solo song piece. “If I tell you it’s Hansel and Gretel,” Mohapatra adds, “suddenly you have an anchor. You can follow the emotion even if you don’t understand the words.”
Mixing it up
The structure of Yatra mirrors this philosophy. The 60-minute programme blends performance with short introductions, guiding audiences through shifting emotional registers rather than presenting music as an isolated technical display.
The question of the audience becomes central to the project. Delhi, the artists acknowledge, is not traditionally associated with opera. Yet both insist that the city’s cultural openness is precisely what makes it fertile ground. Being from Delhi myself, she has always wanted to perform here and bring opera to the city, Mohapatra says.
“In London, audiences are established,” she says. “In Delhi, people are curious. They ask questions. That curiosity changes how you perform.” Choudhary adds that the divide between European and Indian audiences is often overstated. “An audience is an audience,” he says. “Different people may take different emotions home, but the response - if it is genuine - is universal.”
Coming together
Their artistic journeys are themselves shaped by hybridity. Mohapatra, trained in both performance and development practice, moves between opera and peace-building work through music education.
Both describe their paths as gradual rather than linear. Mohapatra’s early training in Hindustani classical music, followed by choral work and opera training under multiple mentors, reflects a continuous negotiation between Indian and Western traditions. Chaudhary’s shift from early vocal training and harmonium to piano and Western classical music reveals a similar trajectory of expansion rather than replacement.
That hybridity extends into the performance practice itself. Opera, Chaudhary notes, is historically orchestral, but in contexts like India, piano transcriptions make the repertoire accessible. “A full orchestra is not always possible here,” he says. “But the piano carries the entire structure. It becomes an orchestra in itself.”
Yet beneath the technical discussion lies a more physical reality: opera is an intensely demanding discipline. Without microphones, singers must project across large halls using breath control, posture and precision. “You become your own microphone,” Mohapatra says.
The strain, however, is managed through awareness and using your vocal chords accordingly for the different pitches in the piece. “If you feel tension, something is wrong,” she explains. “The goal is to feel almost weightless while singing and not use force.”
Yatra is not merely a showcase of Western classical mastery for an unfamiliar audience. It is an attempt to collapse distance between languages, traditions, and performer and listener.
Ultimately, the performers return to the same idea: that music is not translation, but transmission. “You may not understand the words,” Chaudhary says, “but you understand what stays with you after the sound ends.” In that silence after music, Yatra finds its destination.
