Opera

The first opera was Jacopo Peri's “Dafne” in Florence in 1598 — born from a group of artists' attempt to revive ancient Greek drama. They had no real scores from it, so they invented their own form of sung speech. Today that's the recitative.

Wagner's “Ring des Nibelungen” runs 15 hours over four evenings — Wagner had a theater built in Bayreuth specifically for this one work. In the sunken orchestra pit, the players can't drown out the singer, and the audience sees no music stands.

Read the short synopsis beforehand — three paragraphs are enough. In Italian or German, it's not about the words but the music. If you know the plot, you can concentrate on the voices.