10 Worst Deaths in an Opera

Opera is not just for the hoity-toity. It's also for people who like horror movies and Clive Barker books.  Witness the 10 Worst Deaths in an Opera...

1. Tosca - Our heroine leaps to her death. At least she wasn't left paralyzed by the jump.

2. Aida - Radames and the slave-girl Aida suffocate together after being walled up in the Temple of Ptah. They had each other in the end.

3. Bassarids - King Pentheus is tricked into dressing as a woman, but when discovered, he's torn apart by the worshipers of Dionysus, including his own mother. Tsk.

 4. Norma - Druid priestess Norma and her Roman lover Pollione are burned alive after she violates her vows of chastity. Burning to death is always bad, bad, bad.

5. Dialogues of the Carmelites - An entire convent of nuns lines up meekly to be decapitated by revolutionaries. Yes, all of them.

6. Mae Naak - The dead Naak takes revenge on the midwife that caused her death by pulling the woman's intestines out. While singing an aria. Ok, this is just disgusting.

7. Lulu - An opera with a serial killer. Our heroine is hacked to death by Jack the Ripper.

8. Salome - Herod orders his soldiers to crush his step-daughter to death with their shields. I understand crushing deaths are extremely painful. And rather slow.

9. Les Huguenots - The entire cast is butchered by a group of riled soldiers. No survivors.

10. Gotterdammerung - The Valkyrie Brunnhilde sets herself and her horse on fire while singing an 18 minute aria. Again burning but this time it's a supernatural being. My personal favorite spectacular opera death. Almost better than my Favorite Strange Death of All Time...being hit by a falling satellite.