Piece for six voices, notable in Mozart’s operas and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Also a group of six instrumentalists or work written for them to perform; for example, the Brahms string sextets. singspiel (ZING-shpeel) Early German musical drama very similar to English ballad opera or French opéra comique. Employing spoken dialogue along with musical numbers, Beethoven’s Fidelio is technically a singspiel but the term generally implies a comic or light subject. Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) follows the Viennese tradition of singspiel, while his Magic Flute (1791) is a musically more complex work in which the traditions of singspiel, opera buffa, and opera seria are all combined.