Philip Kennicott: “You could go to Boston and back twice in the amount of time it takes to sit through the Ring cycle. And yet I don’t think of this as a particularly long time any more, at least not in the opera house. For some reason, in a world in which it’s hard to find thirty minutes for a hair cut or ten minutes to pay the electric bill, we always manage to find the hours for opera. Where does that time come from?”