Count the tracks before you argue about anything else. Twenty two are listed. Eleven are songs. The other eleven run between twenty one seconds and one minute fifty and consist of narration, effects and orchestral fragments, and any honest assessment of this album has to begin by deciding what to do about them.
Blind Guardian released Nightfall in Middle-Earth on 28 April 1998 through Virgin and Century Media, sixty five minutes in total, the sixth album and the first to reach American shops. It was recorded across roughly seven months in 1997 and 1998 in a chain of studios, produced by the band with Flemming Rasmussen, engineered by Charlie Bauerfeind and Piet Sielck, and it went to seven in Germany and twelve in Japan. Hansi Kürsch sang, André Olbrich played the lead guitar, Marcus Siepen the rhythm, Thomas Stauch the drums, and for the first time Kürsch did not play bass, that job going to the guest Oliver Holzwarth. The choir is Billy King, Rolf Köhler, Olaf Senkbeil and Thomas Hackmann, and if you have wondered for twenty five years how four singers produce that much sound, so has everyone else.
The subject is Tolkien's Silmarillion, and the band takes the material seriously enough to structure the record as narrative rather than as a set of songs about elves. This matters more than it sounds, because the interludes exist to carry the plot, which is a genuine compositional problem honestly attempted and only partly solved.
Consider the vocal arrangement, which is the thing this album is famous for and the thing it should be judged on. Kürsch multiplies his own voice until the count is impossible to establish, then sets those layers against the four-man choir, and the result on "Nightfall" is a wall of male voices moving in parallel thirds and sixths with real part-writing underneath. It is not a chorus effect and it is not a producer's trick. Somebody sat down and wrote those lines.
A wall of voices is only impressive when something is left standing behind it, and here the guitars occasionally are not.
That is the cost, and reviewers have been naming it since 1998. When the layering is at full strength the mix has no room left for Olbrich's rhythm parts, and passages that were presumably written as counterpoint arrive as texture. One Metal Archives reviewer put it bluntly, that the riffs are barely audible under the vocal-forward balance, and while I would not go that far, the 2007 remaster exists partly because that complaint was widespread and correct.
The songs themselves are the finest sustained run this band produced. "Mirror Mirror" is the obvious one, and its reputation is earned by the modulation before the final chorus rather than by the chorus itself. "The Curse of Fëanor" has the most interesting structure here, refusing the expected return until the listener has given up on it. "Thorn" is six minutes of controlled development and is the piece most often called underrated by the people who love this record. "The Eldar" is a piano ballad with vocal harmony written in the manner of Queen, which Rock Hard noted at the time when it made the album its record of the month at nine and a half out of ten, and which remains the boldest thing on the album precisely because it does not sound like power metal at all.
You mentioned Nightfall in Middle-Earth. That is my favorite of all time so far.
Hansi Kürsch, Antihero Magazine, 23 July 2017
Which returns us to the interludes. The defence is that they carry the story, and on "War of Wrath" and "Lammoth" that defence holds: the first sets the scene and the second functions as a genuine transition. The rest do not. "Nom the Wise" is thirty three seconds of narration between two unrelated songs, "Face the Truth" is twenty four, and their cumulative effect on a listener who is not following the Silmarillion beat by beat is to interrupt an album that has just built momentum. Eleven times. A concept record can carry narration; what it cannot carry is narration used as connective tissue in place of composition, and the honest comparison here is with Operation: Mindcrime, which several reviewers have reached for and which solved the same problem by writing transitions into the songs.
Set the fragments aside and what remains is a sixty minute power metal album of real ambition, sung better than the genre had any right to expect and arranged with more care than almost anything around it. Keep them in and you have a record that stops eleven times to explain itself. Both of those albums are on this disc, and the better one is worth the inconvenience of the other.