tomndebb: Check out Siefreid and Tristan. 
I’ll be chuckling over this for a while! 
If Hubby likes tenors, let me suggest a CD:
Luciano Pavarotti
King of the Hi Cs
(London 421 326-2)
Seven arias from mostly Italian opera (one R. Strauss thrown in), beginning with one from Donizetti’s “La Fille du régiment” with nine (count 'em, nine) fully voiced high Cs, each as pure as the driven snow!
I still get chills!
When I used to sing in the opera, the word backstage was that opera was about “sluts who die”. That was rather interesting, considering our season (that year) consisted of La Boheme, Manon, and La Traviata.
I’m taking my girlfriend to her very first opera today. We’re going to see a double bill, Cavaleria Rusticana, and I Paliacci. I’l be leaving to pick her up in about ten minutes.
I’d like to put in my two cents and recommend Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah. So far, all of the suggestions in this thread have been great, but for some reason (and not just in this thread), twentieth-century American operas tend to get overlooked. Susannah was written in 1955 and first performed in 1955 or 1956 at Florida State University in Tallahassee. It’s loosely based on the Apocryphal story of Susanna and the Elders, but has been transplanted to backwoods Tennessee in the 1950s. The music is unmistakably opera, but with an Appalachian folk-music flavor, and it’s very accessible. The only drawback is that, at least at first, the backwoods accents are a little jarring when sung by classically trained opera singers, but you get used to that pretty quickly.
The first opera I ever saw that was not in English was “Lohengrin” and I was floored by it. And it was something like 3 hours and 45 minutes long. I was mesmerized. I’ve been to 5-6 after that. And none has quite measured up.
I’ve also seen “The Flying Dutchman” but the set was very weird (directed by Julie Taymor) and some of the singers weren’t quite up to the task.
If you’re starting off with opera, find one that has a lot of action in it. It helps you stay focused. Avoid ones that are, as a musician in the orchestra told me, “park and barks”, i.e., ones where the singers walk on stage, sing their lines, and walk off. “Nabucco” was like this. It has one great song, but the rest of the time, you really have to pay attention.
I love Wagner, but I had to work my way up to him. The 14+ hours of the Ring Cycle were a little intimidating to me at first. Now, however, I feel like my life won’t be complete until I attend a Bayreuth festival.
My recommendation is to start with a compilation of famous arias. That’s what I did, and I found that as I became familiar with different arias, I became curious about the story behind them–why is Mimi’s little hand so cold (La Boheme)? why does Tosca feel that God has forsaken her (Tosca)? why doesn’t anybody know Prince Calaf’s name? (Turandot) (OK, so I started with a “Best of Puccini” compilation…)
After I got hooked on particular arias, I felt like I could tackle the whole opera. It seemed that knowing something about the story helped me appreciate the mood of the music (some would say the story and the music are, or should be, inseparable–though this kind of depends on what era of opera you’re listening to).
Obviously, I started with Puccini’s operas, which have great music and pretty straightforward narratives (not so many complex leitmotifs as in, say, Wagner)–pretty easy for a newcomer to opera. I’ve been able to branch out since then, though, and even have a couple of 20th-century operas on CD (Bartok, for instance)–as well as all of the Ring Cycle (plus the wonderful Tristan und Isolde).
Many people prefer to begin with opera sung in English…there’s an excellent series by English National Opera on the Chandos label (called “Opera in English”, just to be original…). Other than that, I’d endorse the general swell of opinion above.
BUt you still can’t understand it and need a libreto.
I took German to understand Wagner, and the best I can do is catch a word to find my place.