A Night at the Opera

A Night at the Opera, the seventh album, came out on Virgin in 2002 as CD 7243 8 11825 2 9. It reached Europe in March 2002, on a day no reliable source pins down, and the first edition anywhere was Japan's: Victor Entertainment issued it on 21 February 2002 as VICP-61739, with an acoustic version of "Harvest of Sorrow" added. The title comes from the Queen album of the same name, which had itself taken its title from a Marx Brothers film. It was recorded at Twilight Hall Studios in Grefrath between October 2000 and December 2001, and Charlie Bauerfeind produced, recorded and mixed it. Victor notes that he had engineered Nightfall in Middle-Earth and that this is the first album he produced for the band. Oliver Holzwarth plays bass, and the sleeve was painted by Paul Raymond Gregory. According to the band's own site, two songs deal with Cassandra and the Trojan War, and others with Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the Nazi propaganda machine and Nietzsche. The lead single "And Then There Was Silence" came out in Japan on 7 November 2001 with "Harvest of Sorrow", a song not on the album. Germany's Rock Hard gave the album 9.0 and made it album of the month, and it reached number 29 on Oricon in Japan. "Battlefield" later turned up as the soundtrack to the heavy-metal edition of Adult Swim's game Robot Unicorn Attack. The player on this page plays the 2017 remaster. The running order here is the original's as printed.