Passing along Bow Street in Covent Garden during 1857, you would not have found the Royal Opera House. Instead, you’d be staring at the rubble of the building’s predecessor – destroyed in undignified circumstances on March 5, 1856, after a scurrilously low-grade masked ball, as captured in a newspaper sketch above. “I beheld the ruins & fearful wreck of the poor theatre,” the opera theatre’s director, Frederick Gye, wrote in his diary, “& all my hopes of the most promising season I had ever looked forward to crushed.”

But was Gye downhearted? No. Immediately he hatched plans. But he needed money. The burnt building had not been insured for reasons of cost, and rebuilding the opera house, and Gye’s adjacent new baby, an iron and glass Floral Hall, was estimated at £60,000. That soon rose to £112,000. But Gye was known as an honourable businessman, and he finally got there.

Yet his fundraising success came at a price. Time spent on opera management became increasingly eaten into: there were debt repayment headaches and lawsuits from peeved investors – several rumbling on for years. Financial burdens also affected his opera programming, which grew to focus ever more fiercely on works that the audience already knew (Donizetti, Rossini), or novelties with strong track records abroad.

Gye made a brave prediction: the new edifice, he said, would open its doors on May 15 the following year. Sceptics and optimists placed more than £100,000 in bets on the outcome. Forty-eight hours before the opening performance of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots a Times reporter discovered still “raw walls” and “forests of scaffold poles”, with armies of hands furiously painting, papering, gilding, nailing.

For Edward Middleton Barry, the young architect appointed by Gye, this was his first major commission and his chance to emerge from the shadow of his eminent father, Charles Barry, the chief architect of the Houses of Parliament.

Barry went Italian. But his room for stylistic manoeuvre was limited. Gye had set ideas about the exterior, including the portico – essential if his aristocrats were to step from their conveyances without getting wet. And the auditorium needed three tiers of private boxes: in the funding drive, many of their leases had already been sold.

Gye wanted grandeur, dignity and high fashion, all by May 15. And Barry succeeded, more or less. The Times pronounced it a “truly magnificent theatre”, one with no equal in the world. But he did bequeath practical problems. For example, he lowered the roof over the stage area, seriously cramping available space for storing backdrops and sets. It took nearly 150 years, and the recent redevelopment, for that problem to be eased.

The Floral Hall, opened in 1860, spent the same period stumbling over its identity. The plan was for a flower market by day and a promenading space for Gye’s audiences by night. But flowers wilted under the glass. Exotic fruits were later tried, but the hall never became a commercial success. For that, we now know, it needed three things: interval hubbub, two giant escalators and very much overpriced refreshments.

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