A Night At The Opera is a unique phenomenon in rock music. You can classify it as hard rock, glam rock, or progressive rock. But it doesn’t matter, because Night at the Opera is a genius work from the first to the last note. The album is considered a rock classic and definitely the best album in Queen’s discography.

The tracklist of

Death On Two Legs (Dedicated To…)
Lazing On The Sunday Afternoon
I’m In Love With My Car
You’re My Best Friend
’39
Sweet Lady
Seaside Rendezvous
The Prophet’s Song
Love Of My Life
Good Company
Bohemian Rhapsody
God Save The Queen

Album History
Rock music is a vicious activity. Musicians constantly run the risk of becoming addicted to various pharmacological drugs, fans risk being trampled by cheering crowds, and artist managers risk becoming addicted to money.

Many rock musicians were in bondage to contracts, royalties, and money issues in general. They are musicians first and only secondarily entrepreneurs.

That happened to Queen too. In the very beginning they signed some complicated triple contract with Trident Studios, and everything was organized in such a way that the band got a penny fee of 20 pounds a week, and the management of the company got the rest.

And even after the first big successes with the singles Seven Seas Of Rhye and Killer Queen, not much had changed. Except that the guys were raised to £60 a week. Although Queen II and especially Sheer Heart Attack sold huge numbers, concert halls were finally filling up easily and even critics sometimes began to approve of Queen’s music.

There is a story: in 1974, after Queen’s songs hit the top of the charts, Freddie Mercury went to the head of the publishing company Norman Sheffield to ask for money to buy a piano. But he turned him down, though a week later he bought himself a new Rolls Royce.

And that’s when Freddie got angry. And so did the rest of the quartet. But how to get out of such a paper tangle? Good people recommended John Reed, Elton John’s manager, to the guys. He freed Queen from the contractual curse, giving them a lot of creative freedom and telling them to record their best songs while he takes care of all the money matters.

Queen followed Reed’s advice and concentrated all their efforts, putting all their previous studio experience into working on the record. Here they went to the limit of using studio facilities, taking recording culture to a whole new level. In doing so, a genuine sense of humor helped: in these songs Queen try on different images – from jazz and folk to opera and heavy metal.

And suddenly everything happened! The album became in demand even before its release, “Bohemian Rhapsody” rose to the 1st place of many hit parades, Queen became widely known not only in England, but all over the world, and sold over 1 000 000 copies of the single.

In addition, the album’s material is closely intertwined with their next work, A Day At The Races. Also associated with A Night at the Opera, or rather the song Bohemian Rhapsody, is the beginning of the era of music video production.

Queen already had an epic song about the dark side of show business – Flick Of The Wrist, but here they were completely carried away…

The record starts with Freddie Mercury’s theatrically-rocky overdubs, smoothly changing with “sirens” and increasing cacophonous multi-layered heavy guitars. Then it all shrinks sharply into one point, moving into the main phase of the song, where the dialogue of piano and electric guitar begins, joined by drums and bass. Then a little trio solo from Brian May.
The mood of the tune changes from somber and angry to positive and joyful. But the chorus carries an unrelenting aggression:

Death on two legs
You’re tearing me apart,
Death on two legs
You never had a heart of your own
On the previous three albums, Queen had become skilled at singing in multiple voices. And in this track they consolidated what they learned before. In the choruses, we hear differently colored singing spread out over a stereo panorama:

Kill joy, bad guy,
Big talkin’, small fry
You’re just an old barrow boy
Have you found a new toy to replace me,
Can you face me

And then Freddie adds the very thing he couldn’t say to Sheffield when he was working with Trident Studios:

But now you can kiss my ass goodbye
Brian, Roger and John talked Mercury into making the song less straightforward. But he was inflexible. It is also known that Brian May felt disgusted when he recorded his vocals for this track, so vindictive and not close to him were the lyrics.

The song was played by the band at concerts for a long time, and almost always Freddie announced it like this:

A song about a real motherfucker of a gentleman
or:

A song about a motherfucker I used to know
The composition ends with the phrase “I feel good” and the backward sound of Taylor’s cymbal. And the storm dies down, where it is immediately replaced by the next track.