Not to be morbid, but recently I saw a discussion online comparing and contrasting the different causes of male deaths vs. female deaths in Game of Thrones. The discussion’s aim was to see how gender politics, both in-universe and in the real world, effect the ways that characters die. This inspired me to do some similar research about the myriad deaths in the standard repertoire of opera.
I looked at Operabase’s list of the 100 most frequently performed operas worldwide. Then I made a painstaking list of all the characters in those operas who die, first according to gender, then according to causes of death. Then I used a percentage calculator to fully understand the statistics. Not surprisingly, but interestingly all the same, I found that gender and gender politics do indeed strongly influence the way opera characters die – and the way audiences respond to their deaths too.