These Are The 9 Most Common Causes Of Death In Opera -- Number 6 Might Surprise You!

Preface

One morning, several years ago, I thought it might be fun to figure out what the leading cause of death in sopranos is. In order to figure this out, I went to everyone's favorite opera statistics website Operabase, pulled up their list of most frequently-performed operas, and set to work cataloguing the causes of death in the top fifty. I came up with some crude statistics, and this was all very hastily put-together. I made a mildly humorous Facebook post about it, and went along my merry way.

Cue roughly three weeks ago, when the Metropolitan Opera announced that, for the duration of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they would be streaming performances from their catalogue for free on their website, beginning with a performance of La Boheme, to be followed two days later by La Traviata. I was not the only one to note that it seemed a little lacking in tact for the company to begin their Coronavirus streams with the two popular operas whose plots can be explained by "some stuff happens, and then the soprano dies of a cough." One person humorously suggested that if they cut all the operas from the lineup in which a soprano dies of consumption, there'd be precious few operas left. I chuckled at this, but felt the need to chime in, pointing out that, according to my very unscientific findings several years ago, consumption is actually only the sixth-most-common cause of death in sopranos. It seems so much more common than it is because the two main operas in which it happens are just that popular. In fact, when adjusted for popularity, consumption jumps to being the second-most-common cause of death in sopranos, but does not overtake suicide.

But my numbers were shaky at best, and looking back at my spreadsheet, I saw serious flaws with my methodology. "Well," thought I, "I'm going to be stuck in the house for the forseeable future, might as well do this right."

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Introduction

Since my last go at this, Operabase got a makeover. I quite enjoyed this at the time, because their new layout made it much easier to search for statistics with particular parameters. Basically, the website looked sleeker, and their search functions got an upgrade. But this turned out to more trouble for me in this application. As you'll recall from my Season Analyzer a couple years ago, Operabase does not have an API (at least, not one that I could find), and so I had written a quick script which would parse the source code of the page that had the data on it and extract it into a useable format for me.

Well, thanks to some very liberal use of JavaScript in the new Operabase layout, this was no longer an option for me. I eventually found a workaround in printing the screen with the data on it to a PDF file and literally copy-pasting it into a text file -- having to adjust for random anomalies that cropped up along the way -- which I could then parse using a script into a useable form.

I made the executive decision at this point to only include operas and operettas which had received at least 100 performances (as recorded by Operabase) from 2010 to 2019. This was largely arbitrary, but these are nice round numbers, which got me a much larger sample size than my first time around, and I figure that any opera that did not make the 100 performance cutoff over the course of a decade would be statistically insignificant. In total, 240 operas made the cutoff.

The next step was the tedious one: Going through each opera on the list and cataloguing how many deaths occured, and what caused them. Over the course of the first few dozen operas, I came up with the following main categories of death:

• Consumption
• Murder
• Suicide
• Execution
• Duel
• Dragged to Hell
• Magic/Unexplained
• Madness
• Other

And I had to make some judgement calls. I decided that a duel only counted as a duel if it was agreed to in advance, and entered by both parties on equal footing, ideally with at least one scene occuring between the challenge and the duel itself. Otherwise, it was a form of fight, which, if somebody died in it, I would consider a subcategory of murder.

Magic and Unexplained were lumped together largely for the sake of Wagner, who has a lot of bizarre deaths in his operas. (NB: The decision was made to not count the Hollander, who is already kind of a ghost when the opera begins.)

For a death to count as "Other," it has to have a specific identifiable cause. Example: Euridice bitten by a snake. If no specific cause is made clear, it is "Magic/Unexplained." Because these categories are concerned more with motive or dramatic function* than actual manner of dying, accidents (such as the dropped gun in La Forza Del Destino) were categorized as "other."

* Dramatic function meaning it doesn't really matter from a character standpoint if Juliet stabs herself or takes poison, but it does make a difference if Paris inexplicably murders her.

If a character collapses dead for no reason after singing a mad scene, that is classified as "Madness." If a character collapses dead for no reason without any mad scene, that is "Magic/Unexplained."

Dying of a "broken heart" is "Magic/Unexplained."

I initially had an "Illness Other Than Consumption" category when I made the setup, which I thought would have more people in it. As it turns out, that happens once in all 240 operas on the list, so I just lumped it in with "Other."

Nothing that happens in Candide counts. Too many people come back to life in that one and then die again and then also come back to life again for me to bother keeping track of.

Finally, only discrete countable deaths count. None of this "Brunnhilde sets the world on fire and literally everybody dies even people who weren't in the opera" nonsense. I have to be able to identify a whole number of specific individuals in order for them to make the list. In the case of an "everybody including the chorus dies" ending, such as is Dialogues Of The Carmelites, I counted every relevant individual listed in the dramatis personae, but not the chorus, because choruses differ in size.

Even after I settled on these guidelines, there were still ambiguous and edge cases, and your opinions may differ as to whether I classified them correctly. The sample size is large enough that some individual quibbles should not significantly alter most of the statistics one way or the other.

For simplicity's sake, I have divided the voice types into SATB rather than dealing with increasingly unhelpful subdivisions of voice types. In the case of some ambiguous roles, I have simply made a judgement call, and you may differ.

Finally, I have provided every statistic in two forms. First, on a simple per-opera basis, each opera counts once, and each opera counts equally. Second, an "adjusted" number, which is on a per-performance basis. For example, as an opera, La Traviata accounts for one count of consumption, and Carmen for one count of murder. (NB: Zuniga is not supposed to die per the actual text of Carmen -- if your production kills him off, that's your problem.) But La Traviata was performed more often than Carmen, and so Traviata contributes 6,843 instances to the consumption statistic, while Camen only raises the murder rate by 5,732.

The spreadsheet containing all my data can be found here.

Now the fun stuff.

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Total Deaths by Voice Type

As might be expected, sopranos lead in sheer numbers of deaths. Accounting for 31.3% of deaths in operas, or 40.3% of deaths when adjusted for popularity. Of the four main voice types, Altos make up the smallest slice of the pie. Silent/Spoken roles, and especially trebles, don't seem to die a whole lot, but then they also don't appear in as many operas. To get a better sense of how at-risk given voice types are, we should look at mortality rates.

Sopranos are still the highest-risk demographic, but it's not as grim as you'd think. Only barely 15% of sopranos (or 22% when adjusted) die by the end of the operas they're in. And it makes sense. Intuitively, your average tragic opera has about one soprano death, but most operas have at least one additional soprano comprimaria who doesn't die, and then there are comic operas, which are frequently teeming with sopranos.

Tenors are the second most at-risk voice type, which again makes intuitive sense. Altos and Basses hover near each other. In terms of raw numbers, more basses die than tenors, but there are also a lot more basses in general, and so in terms of percentages, basses have a higher survival rate.

Trebles (i.e, children) tend to survive. Until they grow up to be one of the other voice types. Then they don't.

Total Deaths by Cause

As you can see, murder is the most frequent cause of death in opera by a wide margin. Before adjustment, it's nearly 50% of deaths. Suicide, execution, and magic/unexplained also make up decent chunks of the remainder. When adjusted, murder goes down to just over a third of the pie, while suicide and magic/unexplained pick up most of the slack. The rate of consumption also goes up noticeably, which can be attributed to the fact that La Traviata and La Boheme are just that popular. Note that a lot of the magic/unexplained bump is likely attributable to the fact that I considered all five of the villains in Die Zauberflote (the Queen of the Night, the three ladies, and Monostasos) in this category as being "cast out into eternal night." Die Zauberflote is the second-most popular opera on the list, and, with five magic/unexplained deaths, that multiplies a lot. The takeaway here is really that murder occurs in more different operas, but suicide and consumption occur in more popular operas. So if you want your opera to be popular, end it with a consumption-suicide.

Cause of Death by Voice Type

Leading Causes of Death in Sopranos

Pre-adjustment, murder and suicide have a pretty close split, followed by magic/unexplained, and then execution. Of seven causes of death, consumption is the seventh-most common. (Note: "Dragged to Hell" and "Duel" are causes of death from which sopranos appear to be entirely immune.) Once adjusted for popularity, though, consumption immediately overtakes murder, and becomes the third-most common cause of death in sopranos after a somewhat-increased suicide rate and a massively-increased rate of magic/unexplained deaths. Madness once again holds pretty steady, indicating that madness is pretty evenly represented across all ranks of opera popularity. Sopranos do not get frequently executed, with only one soprano execution ranking in the top 50 (Salome). Since popularity decreases on a pretty steep curve, anything that occurs below, say, five-hundred performances, such as the three named sopranos executed in Dialogues Of The Carmelites, is likely to disappear in the adjusted total.

Leading Causes of Death in Altos

You will recall that altos don't make up a huge number of deaths to begin with, so it doesn't come as a huge shock when they're pretty overrun by murder. Especially in the adjusted total, when you realize that the only opera in which any alto dies at all that even cracks the top ten is Carmen. (Wait, no, one of the three ladies in Die Zauberflote was a mezzo. Well, Hansel Und Gretel a few spots behind helps even it out -- yes I counted the witch as an alto, not a baritone.) Magic/Unexplained getting a boost in the adjusted total is again largely explained by Die Zauberflote. Beyond that, with altos it's mostly just murder, with the remainder of the pie split evenly among suicide, execution, magic, and other, plus a tiny slice saved for duels (Ariodante.)

Leading Cause of Death in Tenors

Once again, pre-adjustment, murder is what most people are most at-risk of. But post-adjustment, tenors are actually slightly more likely to be executed, and, in fact, they are also the only voice type to whom execution poses a significant risk factor. They also have a more prominent risk of sustaining mortal wounds in duels compared to the minimal risk posed to altos, and zero risk for sopranos. A tenor's risk of being dragged to hell stays pretty constant, much like a soprano's risk of madness, which I guess tells us that Don Carlos is right at the tipping point where the weighting becomes negligible. Magic/Unexplained deaths also go up, again largely because of Die Zauberflote. In general though, tenors mostly only have to worry about things that pose clear and obvious danger to one's health -- murder, suicide, and execution.

Leading Cause of Death in Basses

Basses are seriously susceptible to murder. After that, execution, followed by suicide, are the leading causes of death. Curiously, basses are the only voice type where adjusting for popularity does not significantly alter the general picture -- although magic/unexplained deaths swap with draggings to hell. Only one bass gets dragged to hell -- Don Giovanni -- but he does it a lot.

Leading Causes of Death in Silent/Speaking and Treble Roles

I include these for the sake of completeness, but the truth is that there just aren't enough silent/speaking or treble characters who die in opera to get any meaningful statistics from. The only treble in the list who dies is the kid in The Turn Of The Screw, and speaking roles are more common in comedies and operettas anyway. It makes sense that murder would be the leading cause of death in silent or speaking roles though, because they tend not to be major characters, and therefore are unlikely to be so involved in the plot as to merit a suicide, execution, or heaven forbid, a mad scene.

Voice Types per Cause of Death

In order to get a better sense of what the following graphs mean, let's take a quick look at the general voice type breakdown in operas. The following is an aggregate of the all the roles in all the operas on the list:

In short, since basses make up roughly a third of characters in opera, if causes of death were evenly distributed, we should expect basses to account for a third of each individual type. But we already know that basses only half the mortality rate of sopranos, so, broadly speaking, we should expect sopranos to be overrepresented and basses underrepresented for most causes of death.

Here are the aggregate graphs for total deaths:

As we know, sopranos have a higher death rate than any other voice type, and so they make up a larger percentage of total deaths. How disproportionately certain causes of death affect certain voice types can be generally grasped by how much the following graphs differ from the above.

As you can see, consumption affects exclusively sopranos. Don't get the wrong idea though. Remember that sopranos only have 15%/21% death rate, and consumption only makes up a fraction of that. Adjusted, consumption still only kills roughly 3% of sopranos, and, pre-adjustment, it's close to 0%. If you are a soprano in a random opera, you have nearly no chance of dying of consumption. In brief, consumption only affects sopranos, but sopranos are not actually all that affected by consumption.

Murder disproportionately affects basses. As we saw before, murder accounts for more than half of bass deaths, and a randomly selected bass has a roughly 5% chance of being murdered. Altos and Silent/Spoken roles are also murdered more often than you would expect from random chance.

We saw earlier that suicide accounts for roughly one-third of soprano deaths. But supranos account for more than half of suicites which occur in operas. Within the remaining percent, tenors are also somewhat disproportionately represented. But tenors are about to get really really overrepresented.

Tenors get executed a lot. Roughly 2-3% of tenors get executed, and half of executions which take place are of tenors. Tenors also tend to get killed in duels -- which are usually with baritones. Baritones have a knack for surviving duels. The lesson here is that tenors frequently die because they made a bass or baritone mad. (Oh, and the one alto who died in a duel was Polinesso in Handel's Ariodante. Yeah, I had to look it up.)

More different tenors get dragged to hell than basses, but Don Giovanni is just that popular.

(NB: There are multiple Faust operas on the list, and in more than one of them does Mefistofeles drag Faust to Hell. But only in one of them is Hell immediately post-dragging Faust's final destination. I did not count this as a cause of death for characters who subsequently exit Hell during the course of the opera -- this is also why Glucks Orfeo ed Euridice has no deaths.)

Madness and Magic/Unexplained show similar graphs, which makes sense because the line between what is and isn't a mad scene is sometimes blurry, and I sometimes had to make judgement calls with characters who just sort of dropped dead. It's no surprise that sopranos make up the overwhelming majority of madness-related deaths.

And "Other" is the only cause of death that noticeably affects silent/speaking roles.

Here are the mortality rates broken down by cause of death, to give a better perspective on how likely a given singer is to die of a certain cause:

Deaths by Composer

I wanted to put some composer-based statistics at the end here, but was hampered by the fact that most composers didn't write enough popular operas to discern particular trends. So here are the average deaths-per-opera for every composer who was responsible for at least five ranking operas:

It's clear that Verdi is the bloodiest composer on a per-opera basis, with an average of a little over two deaths per opera. This isn't in the chart, but Verdi averages about 9-10 characters per opera (~11 characters per opera is the overall average -- Verdi is brought down by a bunch of his early operas that have 5-8 characters), which means that a character in a random Verdi opera has between a roughly 23% chance of dying. That said, Verdi's most popular operas (La Traviata and Rigoletto) are ones with one death apiece, so, adjusted for popularity, Verdi falls slightly behind Mozart (again, overwhelmingly inflated by the mass-villain-death in Die Zauberflote), Wagner, and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, since we don't tend to think of him as a particularly gruesome opera composer, Rimsky-Korsakov.

It should come as no surprise that Rossini's operas are the most surviveable. Only one Rossini opera out of the nine that made the list has any deaths, Guillaume Tell. Semiramide just barely missed the cutoff. Offenbach's death rate is inflated by Les Contes d'Hoffmann. Donizetti is the only major composer whose death rate serious decreases when you adjust for popularity. He wrote a lot of tragic operas, but three of his four most popular are comedies. Still, the bloodbath that is Lucrezia Borgia is no doubt hurting him.

Finally, this list compiled 262 deaths across 240 operas, or 213,925 deaths across 161,545 performances. No graphs needed here. Your average opera contains 1.09 deaths, and your average opera performance contains 1.32. Tragedies are evidently more popular than comedies.

Conclusion

In order to compile this data, I made some really arbitrary decisions and judgement calls. It is perfectly reasonably that people might disagree with my methodology. This is all incredbly unscientific and meaningless. No conclusions should be drawn from these findings and this was all a massive waste of time.