The album A Night at the Opera (A night at the Opera) contains several of Queen's most famous songs such as Love of my life, You're my best friend or I'm in Love with my car. But, above all, stands out Bohemian Rhapsody, which spent nine weeks at the top of the British charts and became the third best-selling single of all time in the United Kingdom.
The theme consists of six very marked sections: an a cappella introduction, a ballad, a guitar solo, an operatic segment, a space for rock and a tail that takes up the tempo and tonality of the initial ballad. Freddie Mercury tried to make the song, recorded in 1975, an opera in itself.
Queen's songs were normally written in the studio, with the participation of the different members of the band. But this time, Mercury wrote most of the lyrics and music at his home on Holland Road in north London. "It was all in Freddie's mind," Brian May recalled later.
In full brainstorming, the leader of Queen was outlining the main parts of the song with a pen and pencil on a blank piece of paper from the defunct British Midlands Airways airline, on which a 1974 calendar and the telephone numbers of the company's offices appear. at major British and European airports.
These manuscripts, hitherto unpublished, will be auctioned by Sotheby's in an audition that will take place on September 6 in London. The sale price of the 15 sheets is estimated between 800,000 and 1.2 million pounds sterling (between 930,000 and 1.4 million euros).
Until then, the documents will be exhibited in a world tour that begins in New York. They will be in the city of skyscrapers until June 8. They will then pass through Los Angeles and Hong Kong before arriving in the British capital, where they will be included in a series of auctions from August 4 to September 11.
The Bohemian Rhapsody draft reveals the different directions Freddie Mercury was considering for the famous Queen song, including the first title he planned to put on the track: Mongolian Rhapsody. He then changed his mind and crossed out Mongolian to write Bohemian over it.
As these early drafts are "easily lost or discarded," the auction pieces offer "a fascinating immersion into how songs developed and were put together while reminding us of their complexity and musical sophistication," said Gabriel Heaton, a manuscript specialist. from Sotheby's.
The lyrics reveal the artist's hard work and "incredible care" in creating Queen's signature vocal harmonies, Heaton added. "The lyrics are amazing because it shows how hard he worked. He wasn't just throwing words on a piece of paper, but you really see his focus, the thought, the care, the changes and the edits," says Cassandra Hatton, VP of Sotheby's.
Between the pages is an early draft of the intro with the alternate title, alternate lines ("Now it's time to say goodbye, is this reality"), and snippets used later in the song ("Nothing really matters to me"), with a later sketch of the voice lines in blue pen.
There are also two pages together that include a set of abandoned verses (beginning with "Mom, there's a war starting / I've got to go tonight") and drafts of the operatic section that include a page with scattered words and phrases ("Galileo" , "Fandango", "Bismillah", "Scaramouche"... in addition to the discarded "matador" or "belladona").
"He was the type of person who grabbed the first thing that came to hand when an idea came to him," says Cassandra Hatton, although she warns that the supposed "clutter" of those sheets can translate into a misleading idea. When writing We are the champions, Mercury already predicted, for example, that the piece could acquire the character of a hymn and thought about how the audience would repeat rhythms and words from the song.
Sotheby's is also planning to auction a yellow notebook containing 24 pages of lyrics from Jazz, the band's seventh album, recorded in 1978 and featuring the song Don't Stop Me Now. Another red notebook from the early 1970s includes sketches of the band's logo and coffee stains.
Mercury's massive collection of personal items not only consists of his handwritten pages, but also includes the crown he wore at his famous Wembley Stadium concert and the Adidas sneakers he wore to the Live Aid concert in 1985.
A black and red leather jacket, aviator glasses, a silver snake-shaped bracelet and a silver mini-comb barely 2 centimeters designed to trim a mustache are also part of the Freddie Mercury: A world of his own collection, together with singer's clothing -often partly designed by him-, accessories of all kinds, books and paintings.
When the auction of 1,500 objects that belonged to Freddie Mercury was announced in April, Sotheby's had estimated that the set would reach a total of more than 6.7 million euros. Proceeds will be donated in part to the Mercury Phoenix Trust and the Elton John Aids Foundation, two organizations involved in the fight against AIDS.
