The Tragic Heroines

A Disturbing Accounting

If you list the canonical soprano roles in Western opera, you find that most of them die — often for love, often because of male violence or abandonment, often in circumstances where their culpability is minimal and the social forces arrayed against them are overwhelming.

This is opera's most recurring subject, and also its most deeply ambivalent.

The Verdi Heroines

Violetta (La Traviata) and Aida are Verdi's most fully realized women: psychologically coherent characters whose deaths emerge from their own choices under impossible conditions. Violetta's Act II sacrifice — agreeing to leave Alfredo to save his sister's marriage — is one of opera's most devastating scenes.

The Puccini Heroines

Mimì, Cio-Cio-San (Madama Butterfly), and Liu (Turandot