Bizarre Death Scenes in the Opera

All of us know that in any Opera worth its salt the heroine at least has to die at the end and it is not uncommon if the hero and perhaps his rival die too. Knowing this irrefutable operatic trait, composers and their librettists have done a tremendous job providing their operas with some really great dead scenes.

Some that come easily to my mind right now are: the death of Nedda killed by her husband in the middle of a play in I Pagliaci. The suicide of Cio Cio san in Madame Butterfly after her baby is carried away and all hope is lost. Or Violeta Valery in La Traviatta dying of tuberculosis at the same instant that she meets her lover again. However, some composers got a little carried away by this peculiarity of the opera world (actually they overdid big time) and produced what I dare to call really bizarre opera deaths.

Yes, the famous Love-Death of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. “Love-Death” what the hell is that? How can she be living happily (well not exactly happily, but you get my meaning) one moment and be dead the following one? I mean, how exactly that death takes place. One could speculate that after singing for more than four hours Wagner’s music she has no choice but to die, but I don’t believe that this is the case here.

Snegourochka (Snow Maiden) by Rimsky Korsakov. Well, for once, I am a little more willing to swallow the Melting to Death of Snegourochka than the Love-Death of Isolde. I mean, if you were a kind of mythical creature made of snow, it would make some sort of odd sense to die because of the sun rays. However I surely would not like to be the physician who has to sign her death certificate.

Adriana Lecouvreur by Cilea. At least the diagnosis is easier here: Adriana was poisoned. Someone sent her a poisoned bunch of violets and she dies after kissing them, of course when all the misunderstandings with Maurizio her lover got sorted out. Yes for real, can you think of a more stupid and bizarre way to murder someone? To make the affront worse, Adriana Lecouvreur is supposed to be an example of Verismo Opera. It must be because murdering someone with violets is so “realistic.”

When I was doing the reseach to write this hub, I noticed that there are more heroines that could have been diagnosed with love-death. So perhaps, it was an epidemic at the time, lol.

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