Boys in the Attic

Anna Russell used to say that "The best thing about opera is that you can say and do absolutely anything -- as long as you sing it!" And, in all honesty, the operatic repertoire is riddled with thrillingly melodramatic depictions of suicide: A beloved singer jumps off the parapet of Rome's historic Castel Sant'Angelo in Puccini's Tosca. A soldier drowns himself after killing his wife in Berg's Wozzeck. A procession of nuns climbs the steps to a guillotine in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites...