Radio 3 has just concluded a poll to try and find the Nation’s Favourite Aria, and the results are in.

Puccini’s Nessun dorma doesn’t appear, although he is present through E lucevan le stelle from Tosca.  There are no arias by Rossini or Verdi. Mozart appears three times, and there’s even an aria from Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt.

All but one of the arias (if you count Che faro senza Eurydice as a trouser-role) are for soprano or mezzo-soprano. There’s no beseeching tenors singing Che gelida manina or lamenting over flowers in La fleur que tu m’avais jetée, no baritones exhorting us to join the army in Non più andrai.

As Rupert Christiansen remarked in The Telegraph, the prevailing mood is one of doom and gloom among the choices: ‘everyone is either dying, praying or hopelessly in love.’

The winner ? When I am laid in earth, from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

The question remains: is a poll conducted amongst Radio 3 listeners truly representative of the nation’s choices ?  Radio 3’s site does have a caveat: “this is not a representative poll and the figures do not purport to represent public opinion as a whole on this issue.” What results would the same poll have yielded if it had been done by Classic FM ?

What’s your favourite: did it make the list ?