I want to enjoy opera and vocal music, but the words make them inaccessible

I confess that I struggle to enjoy a lot of vocal music, not because I dislike the human voice, but because language feels inseparable from the experience and yet almost always inaccessible in performance, and ruins all vocal music for me.

What frustrates me about opera is that the diction is frequently unclear, especially when performed in languages I do not speak fluently like Italian, German, or French. The whole art form is built around text and expression, yet in practice I often cannot actually understand the words being sung. Translating opera into English rarely solves the issue either, because so much of the musical and poetic character is tied to the original language.

I remember attending a performance of Mozart’s Requiem where I spent almost the entire time staring at the Latin text and translation, trying to follow where each phrase appeared in the music. Instead of experiencing the performance directly, I was mentally matching translated words to the original text while simultaneously trying to process the music. If I cannot clearly understand what is being said, the experience becomes more intellectually exhausting than musically engaging.

I love the concept of Lieder. The intimacy, the nuance of expression, the relationship between poetry and music, all of that is incredible, and especially in a smaller chamber setting, the diction is often much clearer than in opera. But even then, the language barrier remains a huge dead spot. I dislike needing to constantly reference translations while listening rather than absorbing the meaning naturally through the performance itself, and that ruins the entire experience for me.

Opera as an idea is great. But in practice, I often find the experience very underwhelming. Supertitles help, but splitting attention between the stage and subtitles can feel awkward and distancing. Even in English-language operas, Britten, Adès, and others, I frequently still cannot understand the text clearly. On top of that, some modern operatic vocal production feels excessively wide or “wobbly” to my ears, to the point where clarity of text suffers. I genuinely cannot tell sometimes whether that is stylistic, technical, or simply an aesthetic tradition I personally do not connect with.

And having to study the plot beforehand just to follow what is happening during the performance makes the experience feel indirect to. I want to experience the drama and meaning through the music itself, not through homework done in advance.

I think part of the issue is that I need to hear and understand everything in order to fully enjoy music. If an important element, especially the text feels inaccessible to me, it becomes a major barrier to engagement rather than something I can simply ignore.