Operas deal with the important things in life: love, death, hope, desperation, desire, jealousy, passion and rage. And just as in real life, whenever there are strong emotions involved, there is both joy and beauty, and violence and death. These major life events and strong emotions make opera a red-blooded art form.

With all of this passion and violence, we wondered how people actually die in works by the likes of Verdi, Puccini and Rossini. What are the most frequent causes of death in opera? To answer this question, we researched the plots of the 60 most performed operas in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Here are the results: