Three years of opera study after school, and then a microphone in front of distorted guitars: that is the whole direct contribution of the conservatory to some of the most convincing operatic metal vocals ever put on record, and three years is a good deal more formal schooling than the word operatic has usually needed before the metal press pinned it on a high voice.
The Norwegian singer who carried those three years into Conception in 1991, crossed to Kamelot six years later and sang the Faustian lead across two albums, Epica in 2003 and The Black Halo in 2005, was Roy Khan. It is not a crowded door. Most of the voices the music calls operatic never walked through it.
Spin a gyroscope up to speed, stand it on the point of a pencil and hammer the tabletop with a fist until the ashtrays jump and the pencils roll off the edge, and the rotor keeps its axis while the blows go into the wood, tilting a fraction and swinging back, because the momentum stored in the wheel outweighs anything the table can throw at it. Schooling does that to a voice. The drums pound, the guitars shove, and the line holds.
Why most metal tenors turned the schooling down, and what they won over two Marshall stacks by leaving the vowel bright and open, is argued through in the chapter that covers it. The smaller company that took the schooling, and what it changed once it stood inside a heavy band, is a separate story.
Operatic metal vocals from a trained singer
Recorded between June and October 2004 at Gate Studios in Wolfsburg and Above the C in Tampa, and released by SPV/Steamhammer on 15 March 2005, The Black Halo closed the two-part story drawn from Goethe's Faust that Kamelot had opened on Epica. It is the plainest exhibit of what a trained voice does over double kick drums. The phrase stays joined across the bar lines, the vibrato arrives late and even, and the dark vowels never flatten into a shout, even where the guitars are hammering sixteenth notes into the floor beneath them.
The schooling shows most in what the voice declines to do. It never reaches for grit to prove it is in a heavy band, and it never snatches a breath in the middle of a phrase, because the breath was taken two bars earlier, under a fill, and banked. A self-taught tenor fights the song for air. A trained one budgets it.
The song that puts the method under the most pressure is "March of Mephisto", and the voice that answers him in it, as the devil's own, belongs to Shagrath of Dimmu Borgir. The contrast is the arrangement. One voice rips each word open like a grain sack dragged across a nail; the other carries the same words across the bar lines without a seam, and the song needs both to make its argument.
Khan left Kamelot in 2011, confirming the departure on 21 April, and rejoined Conception in 2018. What he left behind is the one Kamelot record on which the trained voice and the guest rasp stand in the same room.
A doom band hires the opera house
Of all these hires the strangest came out of doom. The singer brought into Candlemass for Chapter VI in 1992, a man who had made his stage debut at the Folkan theatre in Stockholm in 1990 and taken a leading role in an opera the following year, was Thomas Vikström, son of Sven-Erik Vikström, a Swedish opera singer.
Put a theatre voice, clean at the top and round in the middle, over riffs built for a monk's robe and the faithful notice at once. The record divided them. Candlemass had come apart by 1994, and the pedigree of the band's singing is still usually traced through the robe rather than the tailcoat, but Chapter VI is the record on which the opera house sent a son of its own to the microphone.
Vikström went on to the other band in Sweden that wanted a trained voice as a matter of policy, Therion, and became one of its permanent singers in 2009. In a band that stacked choirs behind its riffs, a singer who could hold a line against thirty other voices was not a luxury. He was the job description.
In a band that stacked choirs behind its riffs, a singer who could hold a line against thirty other voices was not a luxury. He was the job description.
The mezzo, the growl and the arrangement
The Dutch singer who switched at fifteen from pop and jazz lessons to classical training after hearing a Nightwish record, and who was fronting a new band called Epica at seventeen, was Simone Simons, and the voice that came out of the switch sits lower and darker than the soprano on the record that set her going, closer to the mezzo-soprano's range.
That lower voice changed the arrangement. Epica built its records, from The Phantom Agony, released by Transmission Records in 2003, on a split no opera house would ever stage, the trained voice carrying the melody while Mark Jansen growled the counter-voice beneath it, so that the orchestra's darkest instruments and the band's death metal throat did the same job from opposite ends.
"Unleashed", from Design Your Universe, released by Nuclear Blast in October 2009, is the plainest case. The trained line runs long and level over a riff built at full tilt and a choir stacked behind it, and it never raises its weight to win: it simply holds, while everything under it pounds away at the floor. Simons is, on any honest reading, the best-known exponent of the mezzo in the music.
A trained voice in a metal band is not louder than the guitars. It is steadier than them, and a hall hears steadiness as power.
Julien Vasseur, KaosMetal
Opera as a cast list
The young German who took the word opera literally, handing his guests characters instead of verses and building a plot from the witch trials of his home town, Fulda, and of Mainz, was Tobias Sammet of Edguy, and The Metal Opera, released under the name Avantasia by AFM on 22 January 2001, opened with a salvo of guest singers from half the power metal of Europe.
Michael Kiske as Lugaid Vandroiy, Sharon den Adel as Anna Held, David DeFeis as Friar Jakob, Andre Matos as Elderane the Elf and Kai Hansen as Regrin the Dwarf, with Sammet himself in the lead as Gabriel Laymann: the cast list reads like a programme printed for an opera that no opera house in Europe would ever have booked, and it sold to the very people who would never have bought a ticket for one.
A male lyrebird in the forests of south-eastern Australia will reproduce a chainsaw at full throttle, a camera shutter and a car alarm so exactly that a walker turns round to look for the machine, and there is no machine, only a brown bird on a mound of scraped earth and the shape of the noise. The metal opera took the shape of the opera house the same way: the roles, the acts, the libretto and the villain in a cassock. The covered vowel stayed behind.
"Reach Out for the Light" shows what the form bought instead. The duet trades lines between two high voices the way a stage duet trades them between two characters, each entry a new person rather than a new verse, and the chorus lands on the whole cast at once. Nobody in it sings like a conservatory. Everybody in it sings like somebody in a story.
Where the trained voice stops
The reason the door stays uncrowded is plain arithmetic. A classical voice takes the better part of a decade to build, in rooms with a piano and a teacher, while a metal band is usually formed in a garage by teenagers with a year of practice between them, and the two calendars rarely meet. When they do, the band tends to build the record around the voice rather than the other way round, which is exactly what Kamelot, Epica and the doom record all did.
None of this made the untrained metal tenor redundant. The high voices that never took a lesson in covering a vowel still own most of the music, and the border between the two families is drawn most sharply at the very top of the range, where the question stops being training and becomes falsetto vs full voice.
The trained voice was always a guest in heavy metal. On the records that invited it properly, it behaved like the host.
