Prog-rock opera

Prog-rock operas are stories written into lyrics and set to Progressive rock music to be recorded and performed. Prog-rock operas usually have characters and a plot, as any other story would, and unfold over one or more studio albums, typically called a Concept Album. Common themes include fantasy, mythology, dream interpretation, oppression, self-enlightenment, and life and death.
Notable Prog-Rock Operas
Since the early sixties and seventies, the prog-rock opera has evolved over time. The Who, a British Invasion-era band, not typically considered prog, released Tommy, about a young boy who, after seeing his long-lost father murder his mother's new lover, withdraws into himself, becoming deaf, dumb, and blind. He is repeatedly abused by various people throughout the story, as they think that no-one will find out, and he becomes famous for being the best pinball player. Eventually, he snaps out of the self-induced isolation and becomes a cult leader, and ultimately ends up learning many lessons. Several years afterwards, Rush, an early progressive rock band, is notable for their story of a future ruled by an oppressive class of priests, chronicled in the song "2112", based on the novella Anthem by Ayn Rand. Lyricist Neil Peart also penned a mythical sci-fi tale of a spaceship's journey through a black hole that transports the hero to the realm of the gods in order to bring balance to a war-torn world, described in "Cygnus X-1" from A Farewell to Kings and the side-A title track from Hemispheres. Prog-rock operas often deal with stories of a fantastic or science-fiction nature, but not always, as shown by Tommy, and many Pink Floyd albums. Their album The Wall tells the story of a man who has been oppressed all of his life and builds a wall in his consciousness, to separate himself from all the injustices caused him in his lifetime.
Recent Prog-Rock Opera Revivals
Though the Prog-rock Opera is said to have hit its peak in the mid-seventies, there has been a recent revival of albums that correspond to the label. Dream Theater, a prog-metal band, has released Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory, a full-length concept piece about a man trying to solve a murder in his past life through hypnotherapy. Their album Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence includes an extended piece on its second disc dealing with different stories of people dealing with mental illness. Because these two albums and the subsequent Train of Thought and Octavarium each begin with the same musical passage or sound effect that ended the previous album, some believe they form a successive story; however, the band has denied this and the subject matter of the albums is generally unrelated. Octavarium, though, does include a twenty-four-minute title track that might well be considered a rock opera. The Mars Volta has released De-Loused in the Comatorium, an album commemorating a longtime friend of the band, Julio Venegas. The hero, Cerpin Taxt (symbolizing Venegas) overdoses on morphine, goes into a week-long coma, and is shown visions of humanity and his own twisted psyche. When he wakes up, dissatisfied, he jumps off of a highway overpass to his death. To date, The Mars Volta has also released Frances The Mute, a story of an orphan searching for his long lost mother, and The Bedlam In Goliath, chronicling the band's bizarre misadventures with a Ouija board that was purchased while in Jerusalem. The Trans-Siberian Orchestra released Beethoven's Last Night in 2000, in which the devil visits Beethoven on the last night of his life; it features both original tracks and rock arrangements of music by Beethoven and Mozart.
Notable Multi-Album Operas
The Coheed and Cambria albums The Second Stage Turbine Blade, In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3, Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness, and Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow are the second, third, and first and second halves of the fourth installment of the five part saga of the characters Coheed and Cambria Kilgannon, and their children, android-like beings created to combat a corrupt race of mages on humanity's behalf and take back the Keywork (their universe).
The works of Ayreon are also excellent examples of Prog-Rock Operas. They tell an intricately woven story over the span of seven separate albums to tell the tale of the end of the human race. Begun by a race of aliens who had evolved so far as to lose all emotion, and desired to relive emotional experiences through a grand experiment, the human race has finally come to its end, at which point scientists send messages backward in time to a mystic living in 6th century Britain, so that he might warn the others and prevent the fall of humanity. The line between reality and fantasy is blurred, since it is revealed that at the end of one album, the events of the entire disc were merely a dream sequence played for the last surviving human. The Twilight of the Stars is the narrator of part of the epic, a representative of this forlorn extraterrestrial race.
Writing Styles
Claudio Sanchez, lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist of Coheed and Cambria, demonstrates very simply the style of writing a Prog-rock Opera. The idea is to take what you know, think, or have seen, and turn it into a fantastic story. Sanchez takes this to the extreme of basics, modeling Coheed and Cambria after his parents, and making their children into himself and his siblings, even using their real names for their characters (in the story, Claudio Kilgannon is the main character, a messiah-like figure, made to bring about the end of a writer's imaginary world. For More, See The Amory Wars). Jesse, A.K.A. The Prize-Fighter Inferno, "brother" of Coheed and a prize-winning boxer, is modeled after Claudio's brother Matthew Sanchez (not to be confused with Matthew Kilgannon, brother of Claudio in the story). Al the Killer, a ship's captain in the story, is supposedly based on an uncle of Sanchez's.
The style of Arjen J. Lucassen is different than Sanchez's, but more defining, and widely used: the usage of multiple vocalists to play different parts. Different vocalists (often highly distinguished singers, like Strapping Young Lad's Devin Townsend, Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson, ex-Marillion vocalist Fish, Blind Guardian's Hansi Kursch, Dream Theater's James LaBrie, Simone Simons, Jorn, and many, many others) play the various characters in the multiple story lines, most notably on The Human Equation and Into the Electric Castle.

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