AVANTASIA TRIVIA
Trivia
The Japanese edition of Moonglow carries a bonus track the other editions do not: 'Heart'. The standard edition is GQCS-90672 and the first-press edition with an instrumental CD is GQCS-90676/7, both with Japanese sleeve notes and translated lyrics; a mail-order run of a hundred sets also came with a card signed by Tobias Sammet.
Sammet first came to Japan in 2002. Speaking to BARKS in 2019 he called it a wonderful experience and said he had looked forward to every return since, adding that Japanese audiences are known for hearing quality in music. The Japanese date of the Moonglow tour was played on 9 May 2019 at Mynavi BLITZ Akasaka in Tokyo.
Moonglow reached number one in Germany in 2019. Alongside that, Avantasia have taken gold awards, streaming figures in the hundreds of millions, headline slots at the major metal festivals and sold-out arena shows around the world.
The idea for Avantasia came to Tobias Sammet on an Edguy tour bus. As he tells it, a singer has to protect his voice, so while the others were out enjoying themselves he was left lying in the bus alone, not even talking. Wanting to try something outside the routine of a band and to widen his horizons, he arrived at the thought of making an album with every one of his heroes on it.
The album of heroes had specific faces from the start: it was to be the occasion on which Michael Kiske, Kai Hansen and Markus Grosskopf played together again. If they were not going to arrange it themselves, Sammet reasoned, somebody had to — and what he wanted was Kiske singing something in the manner of 'Eagle Fly Free', Grosskopf on bass and Hansen there too.
The first album, 2001's The Metal Opera, is also the record that brought Michael Kiske — then largely withdrawn from the scene — back to it. He stayed: as of 2010 Kiske had appeared on every Avantasia album there was.
Avantasia was meant to be finished after two albums, and after 2002's The Metal Opera Part II it was widely taken to be. The response outran expectations, and Sammet restarted it in 2008 — the year Edguy were at their peak — after which albums came every two or three years alongside the band.
Moonglow is a concept album, subtitled Narratives of a Misplaced Entity. Its subject, in Sammet's description, is the outsider — the wrong surroundings, the sense of not fitting where you are — cast as the confession of someone dropped into a world he feels no connection to. He names the Victorian gothic writers Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, and Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann, as influences, and describes the lyrics as his own version of that kind of fiction.
Here Be Dragons is the first Avantasia album with no concept behind it. The title track, by Sammet's account, was partly carried over from the previous record, and its name comes from the warning old sea charts put on uncharted water — beyond this lies the unimaginable. He read it as an invitation rather than a warning, and decided to write individual songs without the weight of a story.
Here Be Dragons, the tenth studio album, came out on 28 February 2025 and was Avantasia's first record for Napalm Records. All ten songs were written and composed by Tobias Sammet alone; he and Sascha Paeth produced and recorded it, Paeth mixed it and Michael Rodenberg mastered it.
The cover of Here Be Dragons was painted by the British fantasy artist Rodney Matthews. Among its limited editions is a three-disc set built around a ninety-six-page hardcover art book, with more than a hundred and sixty images, drawings by Matthews and written pieces to go with the music and the pictures.
By the time he started The Metal Opera, Sammet already had seven years of Edguy behind him. Bands are wonderful, he has said, but he wanted something of his own that broke the routine — and that is where Avantasia came from. Blabbermouth dates the project's beginnings to 1999, the same year Edguy supported Angra in France, which is where its first guest came from.
André Matos came to Avantasia through a meeting in 1999, when Edguy supported Angra on a tour of France. Sammet asked him on the spot to take a guest role on The Metal Opera parts one and two. He later returned the favour on one of Matos's own records and on a DVD, and the exchange went on from there.
Having finished the two Metal Operas, Sammet says he thought he would never do it again — it had been that hard. A few years on the same idea came back: bands are fine, but perhaps the Avantasia adventure was worth another go.
The 2008 restart took Avantasia on stage properly for the first time, and the world tour peaked with a headline slot at Wacken Open Air. By Sammet's account, quoted by Blabbermouth, more than a hundred thousand people were in front of them. André Matos was part of that live ensemble.
The Scarecrow, released on 25 January 2008, was among the twenty best-selling albums across the whole of Europe in the fourth week of that month. Its single 'Lost in Space' was a German top-ten hit, and the album charted in fifteen countries, reaching the top ten in four of them.
'Lost in Space' came out as two separate EPs and entered the German Media Control chart at number nine. By Blabbermouth's account that was the highest singles-chart entry in the history of Nuclear Blast Records.
The first two albums were repackaged in 2008 as The Metal Opera - Gold Edition, a two-disc set AFM Records issued on 7 March. It came as a luxury digibook with gold-coloured discs, a forty-page booklet, sleeve notes, previously unpublished photographs and bonus material.
The Wicked Symphony and Angel of Babylon were not a single record split in two. By Sammet's account, when work began in 2006 a rock opera of more than twenty songs already existed, and it was clear from the start that the story would need two albums; the writing then carried on and the material grew further.
Sammet said of the two-album set that it might be the last big epic he would be able to afford. With CD copying and downloading as they were, he could not see traditional rock and metal bands being able to fund this many guests, an orchestra and a choir again — which is why he took his time over it and wanted it to be the largest thing he had made.
Cloudy Yang, the female voice on the two-album set, had originally sung the guide demo meant to steer whoever would sing it for real. Her demo was so good, by Sammet's account, that they kept it. Yang had sung backing vocals on Avantasia's world tour alongside Amanda Somerville, and on Edguy's 'Dragonfly'.
Jon Oliva of Savatage sings on a theatrical piece called 'Death Is Just A Feeling'. Sammet described the song as a little film in itself, eerie enough to serve as a chapter in a horror musical. The duet with Klaus Meine was recorded at Mousse T's Peppermint Park studios in Hannover.
The covers of The Wicked Symphony and Angel of Babylon were made by Thomas Ewerhard, who had also done the artwork for Edguy's Hellfire Club and for Avantasia's The Scarecrow.
Ghostlights, the seventh studio album, came out on 29 January 2016 through Nuclear Blast and entered the German chart at number two. It runs to twelve songs, produced by Sammet and Sascha Paeth at Gatestudio in Wolfsburg, Germany, with Paeth engineering and mixing and Michael Rodenberg mastering.
There is a reason Moonglow was made without deadlines. When the Ghostlights tour ended in 2016, both Edguy and Avantasia were without a record contract, and for the first time in his life Sammet had no schedule and no plan. That is what let him write a song, leave it for a couple of months, come back and work on it again — and, by his own account, it is also the most expensive record he has made.
Sammet found Alexander Jansson, who painted the Moonglow cover, through an internet image search: he was looking for an artist who had never worked with a rock band. He did not know the name or the work, but was drawn to pictures that were cute and grotesque at once — and discovered that Jansson is a well-known children's picture-book illustrator in Sweden. Sammet sent him the words of the opening song, 'Ghost in the Moon', and explained the dark feelings the album's protagonist carries.
There is no single way a song gets its singer in Avantasia. Sammet writes some with a particular voice in mind — 'Requiem for a Dream' was Michael Kiske from beginning to end — and others with only a type of voice in view, then goes looking for someone who can do it once the song exists. Candice Night was the second kind: the song came first and she was found afterwards.
The recording is not uniform either. Sammet works in the studio with Geoff Tate and Jorn Lande, but Candice Night recorded in New York. When her vocal files arrived, he has said, it felt like Christmas — what came back was exactly what he had imagined.
Hansi Kürsch of Blind Guardian appears on an Avantasia record for the first time on Moonglow. Sammet had wanted him for years without it happening. 'The Raven Child', which carries Celtic elements, needed a particular voice, and with Blind Guardian's 'The Bard's Song' in mind he finally asked. The two have been friends for over twenty years.
Mille Petrozza of Kreator also appears for the first time on Moonglow — and the first thing he wanted to know was whether this would be a bonus track, because the song he had guested on for Edguy's Hellfire Club had been one. Sammet's answer was that Hansi Kürsch, Jorn Lande and Ronnie Atkins were all on the same song.
Here Be Dragons carries the expected row of guest singers: Geoff Tate (ex-Queensrÿche), Roy Khan (Conception, ex-Kamelot), Tommy Karevik (Kamelot), Ronnie Atkins (Pretty Maids), Michael Kiske (Helloween) and Adrienne Cowan (Seven Spires), among others. It is the fourth Avantasia album Tate has sung on.
Avantasia began as Sammet's side project, and by 2025 Blabbermouth was writing that it is Avantasia, not Edguy, that holds his focus. Seventeen years had passed since the 2008 restart, and seven more studio albums had come out in them.