A. Italian Romanticism was marked by the glorious Belcanto tradition, which means virtuosic singing, with many ornaments and cadences. Although Verdi is not a typical Belcanto composer, he still employed those practices and treated the voice like an elaborate instrument. Wagner, on the other hand, didn't put divas and divos in the first place. He cared about the internal dramatical unity of an opera as a whole, so his operas are more (but not completely) syllabic - that is, the music is composed in accordance with the rhythm of speech.
