Year's work lost as score for new opera is stolen
   By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent, Telegraph Newspaper

   MICHAEL BERKELEY, one of Britain's leading modern composers, has
   suffered the biggest nightmare of every writer.  The half-finished
   score for a major opera he had been writing for a year has been
   stolen.  It was his only copy.

   He said yesterday: "It is irreplaceable.  This is the lowest point
   of my life and I feel as if I have had my heart ripped out." He said
   he would almost certainly have to abandon the work, an adaptation of
   Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre with a libretto by David Malouf, the
   writer shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

   He was due to deliver the completed 100-minute chamber opera next
   April in time to be performed at the Cheltenham Music Festival, of
   which he is artistic director.  It was then to be heard in Wales and
   at the Royal Opera House in London.

   Mr Berkeley, son of the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley, had completed
   the first two scenes of Jane Eyre, sketches for the ending and 12
   pages of piano reduction, a total of 67 sheets written in pencil.
   He discovered their loss yesterday morning.  He believes that they
   were stolen while he unpacked his car outside his home in Notting
   Hill, west London, the night before.

   The manuscript was in a large black zipped designer's portfolio.  He
   is unsure whether it was stolen from the car, or from his home in
   Blenheim Crescent, while the door was left open as he unloaded after
   returning from his farmhouse in Wales.

   Mr Berkeley, 50, is one of the country's most prolific composers.
   He has written more than 50 works including one previous opera, Baa
   Baa Black Sheep, about the troubled childhood of Rudyard Kipling, a
   ballet and film music and has been premiered at the Proms.

   He is a member of the board of the Royal Opera House, its only
   composer, and is a broadcaster on Radio 3 and Radio 4.  Mr Berkeley
   offered a reward of "several hundred pounds" for the return of his
   manuscript or information leading to it.  His telephone number is
   0171-229-6945.

James Kearney
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