Gesamtkunstberk

Gyppo Byard snatched an Oxford degree from the butter-stained fingers of a punt-bound Classicist, and has since supplemented his career as a heather merchant with some musical freelancing. He smacks a dismantled, unlicensed Austin A30 with badger bones and passes it off as a gamelan to the credulous secondary schools of Berkshire.

In order to confirm his status as Twyford's top troubadour, Gyppo has listed his 12 favourite operas and challenged the rest of the world to do the same.

My view of opera is similar to that of Kaiser-i-Hind George V, who told Sir Thomas Beecham that he liked La Traviata best as it was the shortest he could think of. His Imperial Majesty also thought "people as write books otter be shot", an understandable sentiment given that his reign spanned the careers of Galsworthy and Virginia Woolf.

So, if you can't sing it in a couple of acts, preferably in a wig and/or Polari, then you need to go back to composer school or whatever.

Having said that, I have more than a passing fondness for chunks of the most meandering atonal nonsense ever to stagger around a stage in predictably daring costumes.

I have some common ground with Gyppo apart from the clods of earth he frees from my lawn in an attempt to establish a Rrom Rrepublic by land reclamation. I too like Philip Glass's Akhnaten.

It fits the bill of being at least partly sung in a foreign language - in this case the Victorian gentleman scholar's impression of what Middle Egyptian might have sounded like. It is also quite short if you play it without repeating the arpeggios and ostinati - about 20 minutes in total.

Here's my favourite bit, performed by clay rodents:

I'm partial to the slabs of Wagner that involve little or no singing. The overtures, preludes and ballet sequences to his operas are genuinely musical, and help you forget the Lara Croft stuff about dragons and bosomy ladies. The prelude to Tristan and Isolde, the Venusberg music from Tannhäuser and the Ride of the Valkyries bring back happy memories:

• Tristan is based a Welsh story of ambling around damp castles in search of someone with a candle and some shoes;


• Venusberg is a mercifully short novel by Welsh toff Anthony Powell, written before he wasted his life on a Dance to the Music of Time; and


• The Valkyries recall a night of drunken misbehaviour with a secretary from Turku in a Russell Square hotel. She shared her duty-free with me - an act of stunning sacrifice for a Finn.

Here's some Tristan:

Alban Berg's Wozzeck is short and has an excellent aria "Eia Popeia", which I sing to lull our daughter Arianrhod to sleep as she roosts gently above the hearth. It also has a series of long sustained notes that impressed Benjamin Britten, which is odd given his fondness for tunes.

Berg attended a performance of Wozzeck in Leningrad in the pre-Stalin days when Soviet music included factory whistles and choirs of alarmed county gals in workers' smocks. He spent most of his time there in fear of assassination - possibly by the armed wing of the musicians' union whose members had to play it.

Here's the lullaby sung by Merav Barnea:

Berg went one better with Lulu. Let's face it, I was going to like anything named after my favourite russet Scottish songbird. It's long but unfinished, so I cherish the thought that Alban would have cut it down to about an hour if he hadn't died of toothache on Christmas Day in an act of excessive pathos.

Lulu has everything an opera ought to have - lesbians, stockings and top hats - including Jack the Ripper. Here's Saucy Jack, cleaning the streets:

"Peter Pears

Need put on no airs

He's had them written

By Benjamin Britten.

So fuck off, Tippet!"

That's what our claque of opera thugs used to chant at premieres of Sir Michael Tippet's latest sack of clomping, brass-laden whimsy, and we weren't wrong. Britten unravelled a skein of tenor roles just for our Pete, but I find them reedy. It's only now that they are getting adequately butched up by other singers.

The English tweedy sense of the absurd is uneasy with opera, and Britten was the first to write stage works that weren't Celtic or hilarious - intentionally or otherwise. The Turn of the Screw is an eerie chamber work, with a libretto by exquisite, Welsh Myfanwy Piper that draws out themes from the story with malign delicacy. It also has a mercifully small tenor role.

Here's Miles's queasy aria "Malo" from a fine film version (with Dutch subtitles for the Flemings among you):

Sweet dreams.