1. Così fan tutte (the tenor) and Il Trovatore (the faithful retainer of Count di Luna, and the character who opens the opera).
2. In Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio, the heroine, Leonora, disguises herself as a man in order to gain access to the prison where her husband is a political prisoner.
3. In Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Count Almaviva calls himself Lindoro, a poor student, in order to woo Rosina and to make sure that she's not a fortune-hunter.
4. In Rigoletto, the Duke of Mantua, poses as "Gualtier Maldé," yet another poor student, to woo Gilda, as he is a known rake and the employer of Gilda's father, Rigoletto.
5. Allegedly in a desert on the outskirts of New Orleans. (Bet you didn't know that the Mississippi delta was that dry.) Poor Puccini was stuck with the original novelist's rather confused sense of geography; the Abbé Antoine-François Prévost clearly lacked an atlas.
6. Verdi originally set this tale of political intrigue and regicide in the late 18th Century court of King Gustave III of Sweden. The threat of censorship, however, forced him to change the setting to Boston. The king became Riccardo, Royal Governor of Massachusetts, and the would-be assassins, Count Ribbing and Count Horn, became, respectively, Samuel and Tom. (Poor Adams and Jefferson!)
7. In Gianni Schicchi, the Donatis are hot for "i mulini di Signa," but of course Schicchi, posing as the dying Buoso, leaves them to himself in his "will."
8. Civitavecchia, a port city north of Rome. After Tosca makes her unpleasant deal with Scarpia -- Cavaradossi's life for her body -- Scarpia writes out a safe-conduct that she believes will allow her and her lover to leave the country. But nobody gets to Civitavecchia; it all ends in stabbing and shooting and jumping off a roof.
9. In Alfredo Catalani's La Wally, the hero, Hagenbach -- who has already survived being pushed off a mountain by his rival -- dies in an avalanche after his reunion with his beloved Wally at her mountaintop hut. Wally jumps after him. The end.
10. In La Gioconda, when urged to flee for his life, Enzo -- who was exiled from Venice and has now returned at the risk of death -- takes the rather extreme and unnecessary step of burning his own ship just to prove that he's not a coward. That'll show 'em!
11. The Rhine overflows its banks and Valhalla goes up in flames at the end of Götterdämmerung.
12. Madama Butterfly. In preparation for her marriage to Pinkerton, Cio-cio-san converts to Christianity, thus incurring the wrath of her uncle, the high priest Il Bonzo, and causing her family to desert her on her wedding day.
13. In Bellini's opera, the title character is a Druid priestess.
14. Elvira, the heroine of Bellini's I Puritani, is, surprise, surprise, a Puritan. Her lover Arturo is a Cavalier (i.e., plain old Anglican), and since Cromwell is in power, he's not in a good position to marry, or even to stay alive. He does, however, manage to get her father's consent, but ruins everything when he runs off with the disguised former Queen (from only the purest political motives). Elvira goes mad, Arturo returns, Arturo is arrested, Elvira regains her sanity, Arturo is pardoned, and they all live happily ever after.
15. In Suor Angelica, the heroine has retired to a convent after giving birth to an illegitimate child. When her aunt, in an effort to get Angelica to give up her inheritance in favor of her sister, pitilessly tells her that the child is dead, Angelica takes poison. As she dies, she sees a vision of the Blessed Mother with her child.
16. That's Jenny Lind as the sleepwalking Amina in the 1848 London production of Bellini's La Sonnambula ("The Sleepwalker," of course.) In this climactic scene, Amina sleepwalks across the mill roof, thus proving to her doubting fiancé that she wasn't really fooling around with Count Rodolfo when she was found sleeping in his room. No, really, she wasn't.
