As in most modern operas, the script of Dead Man Walking reads like a play. With the exception of the opening spiritual, "He Will Gather Us Around," there are no big choruses or repetitive songs, no equivalent of "La donna e mobile" or "Largo al factotum." But it's exactly this that brings home the truth of opera: how much would be lost if you only produced it as a play.

To see for yourself, read these dialogues out loud, as if they were merely a play, before listening to the musical setting. Suddenly those lines, gripping to begin with, flower into life, like going from black and white to color. Opera may take away from the literal reality of a scene, but it adds so much to the deeper realities underlying that scene that there's no comparison.

In music drama (as opposed to song-filled operas), two things happen. First, the lines are sung, even though it's not in rhyming lyrics. So everything that every character says is infused with the power that only music can bring. Second, the orchestra isn't just a big guitar accompanying the singer (think "La donna e mobile" again, with its boom-chick-chick); instead, it works like a film score, filling the air with melodies that are tied to ideas and emotions and characters, so that by the end there's a rich tapestry of references that are working on you, even if you're not quite aware of them.

If you haven't been to an opera recently (or ever), your idea of what it's like probably comes from preconceived notions, outdated cartoons, and snobby characters in movies and sitcoms. But these days, more and more people are tossing those preconceptions and giving opera a fresh hearing. What they then experience can be overwhelming: real people, live and unedited, with no computer animation, no sound system — not even a microphone — nothing between them and the audience, speaking a language we can understand, undergirded by a musical language that's immediate, accessible, and serious. That's a combination you just don't experience anywhere else.