Queen

Queen have been one of the most remarkable commercial phenomena in the entire history of rock; their career, which began in the early Seventies, effectively came to an end with the death of Freddie Mercury, after twenty years of uninterrupted success, more or less deserved. Music critics have often spoken out with considerable polemical vigour against Freddie Mercury and Brian May's band, and often, it must be said, rightly so. However, Mercury himself never made a secret of why he kept making music: “I love the good life,” he used to say, and selling millions of records is an excellent way to get the money needed for it. Queen's music never tried to hide its vocation for easy listening, for straightforward chart appeal, and it would be a mistake to reproach the English band's albums for this trait: they are nothing more than what they were conceived to be.

However, at least two albums in the band's twenty-year output deserve a different kind of recognition: “Sheer Heart Attack” and “A Night At the Opera”, released two years apart, share a pronounced taste for theatrical forms of expression, and in fact represent the compositional peak of the Mercury-May duo.

“A Night At the Opera”, released by EMI in 1975, is perhaps the most successful example of Queen's “pastiche” streak, in which the band managed to combine maximum compositional creativity with maximum “listenability”. The famous single “Bohemian Rhapsody”, one of the best-known songs in rock history, is just one of the moments where this alchemy becomes true art. The album's title, a nod to the Marx Brothers film of the same name, sums up the record's underlying idea: to serve as the ideal soundtrack to an evening of “light” entertainment. Opera was in fact a genre born of the humblest origins, and even at the height of its glory it drew audiences from wildly different social backgrounds to the theatre (unlike chamber and symphonic music, which always remained the preserve of the wealthy classes).

Queen blended some of the most “popular” musical genres of all time to create an unmistakable sound. Opera and operetta, vaudeville, the music-hall tradition, Broadway musicals, the hard rock of Who and Led Zeppelin, and the glam streak of Marc Bolan and David Bowie all pour into “A Night At The Opera”, blending magically into one another in a seamless flow.

The album opens with “Death On Two Legs”, a caustic mid-tempo number driven by May's chromatic riff. Mercury's voice is powerful, clear, highly expressive. The singer plays the jester and the dandy, indulging freely in crooning, harsh edges, falsetto, operatic singing, and comic impersonation. Mercury's very strong theatrical streak, the backbone of the band's live shows, comes through just as clearly in the songwriting. The whole album could serve as the soundtrack to a musical, if only it had thematic unity: it's no coincidence that the sequencing of the tracks and the emphatic, dramatic style of the guitar melodies bring it close to the music Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote for “Jesus Christ Superstar”.

Queen's use of choirs and vocal harmonies isn't filtered through the way the Everly Brothers used them in the late Fifties, or later the Beatles and Crosby Stills & Nash, but is borrowed directly from operetta and musical theatre. Here the chorus is restored to its original function as counterpoint to the soloist. Where the Beatles built their harmonies on top of the vocal melody, Queen often place them alongside it, to create the theatrical effect of call and response.

“Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon” is a vaudeville sketch: the voice is filtered to sound as though it's coming out of a gramophone horn. The skipping piano, the late-nineteenth-century London atmosphere, the openly Wildean lyrics all lay bare Mercury's sexual ambiguity (“I'm bound to be proposing on a Saturday night”) and the mimetic potential of his voice.

“I'm In Love With My Car” is an epic-toned rocker, dedicated by Roger Taylor to his passion for cars. Many have missed the sly self-mockery of this track, in which Taylor's thin voice apes Plant and Daltrey – and the machismo of a certain kind of rock – while extolling his love for his own car.

The parodic side of early Queen's music often escaped critics at the time and since, who accused them of self-indulgence. Even on the pop ballad “You're My Best Friend”, musically predictable and built on a well-worn melody, what's actually happening is a parody of the romantic piano song. The “silly” backing vocals are a jab, not a concession to easy-listening pop.

“'39”, in which the Mayflower pilgrims' voyage is recast as a forced, melancholy departure, is a folk-inspired track, still dressed up with little choral flourishes and wobbling along on a bass line straight out of a ballroom orchestra, like something from a variety-theatre cabaret: May's voice sounds distant, resigned. The electric guitar mimics the timbre of violin and accordion. Brian May stayed forever devoted to the thick, midrange-centered tone that was the hallmark of his homemade guitar, but he was never again able to fold it into the music with such ironic savoir-faire.

“Sweet Lady”, the album's only true classic hard rock number, is a slowed-down knock-off of the Who, and it's perhaps the record's one lapse in tone. Yet even this song takes on another meaning if you buy into the “parodic” reading of the album as a whole. “Seaside Rendez-vous” is the natural continuation of the London music-hall atmosphere of “Lazing On A Sunday”, transplanted into Belle-Epoque France. It's genuine cabaret music, complete with bells and a kazoo solo; all that's missing is a chorus line of dancers.

“The Prophet's Song” is the album's most ambitious track, and its true centerpiece. Often wrongly labelled the “poor cousin” of “Bohemian Rhapsody”, it's actually a mini-suite with an acoustic intro, a hard rock theme, a choral bridge of overdubbed voices, and a return to the theme. Structurally it echoes that masterpiece “My God” by Jethro Tull, inheriting and amplifying its theatricality. Here, more than anywhere else on the record, the comparison to musical theatre really fits. The centuries-old literary set-piece of the oracle's prophecy is sketched out with verbal and melodic emphasis. There's only one singer, but he's capable of endless disguises: every time Mercury shifts register, or the chorus cuts into the texture, the floor is handed to a different character. The middle section is a Mercury vocal solo, overdubbed on itself four times out of sync: several voices sing the same melody at different moments, entering at regular intervals, in a kind of staggered counterpoint. This vocal technique, in fact, is widely used in continental European folk rhymes and nursery songs.

Without a break, we move into a moving love song: “Love Of My Life”. Despite the grandiose arrangement of piano, voice and harmonies, the melody keeps the look and mood of a serenade sung beneath a window. The electric guitar flourishes mimic a viola, and the ending is entrusted to a harp – a real one, this time.

With “Good Company” the character changes again, and we find ourselves facing a street busker (Brian May) telling his sad story with a ukulele in his arms. Once more the electric guitar disguises itself, this time echoing a barrel organ.

The album closes with the legendary “Bohemian Rhapsody”: a prodigious summary of several centuries of European and non-European popular music history. There are church Christmas carols, the Platters, Led Zeppelin, opera, Monteverdi's melodrama, Bach's cantatas, Verdi's choral melodies, Frank Sinatra, Broadway musicals. Everything is thrown together and blended with no regard for chronology: church singing grafts onto power-ballad, guitar solos lead from cabaret atmospheres to those of opera, in a riot of vocal overdubs, melodic ideas, and forceful riffs mimicking brass-section progressions in an orchestra caught between angelic and demonic choirs, all without ever losing sight of the main melodic theme.

The “night at the opera” closes with an electric-guitar transposition of the British national anthem. As faithful as it is ironically “corrected”, “God Save The Queen” is one last jab, aimed both at Her Majesty the Queen of England and at “His Majesty the King of the guitar”, Jimi Hendrix, who at Woodstock had delivered a blazing (and equally provocative) version of the American national anthem.

Queen's art is one of the most emblematic musical expressions of the twentieth century's “rediscovery” of the Baroque. Their take on a “kaleidoscope music” – tragic and comic at once, open to both the infinitely vast and the infinitely small, afflicted by grandeur and disillusionment, a great cauldron in which to mix impossible ingredients – is in many ways spiritually close to the literary Baroque of the early 1600s, and gives us one of the highest moments of that disoriented, distinctly twentieth-century madness, one lacking any certainty about which path to follow, which would give rise on one hand to the minimalist tendencies that mark our whole era, and on the other to a handful of isolated episodes of melancholy delusions of grandeur – among which we would count this very album.

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29/11/2009