Queen - A Night at the Opera Review

The album opens with Mercury's poison letter to the band's former manager, set to one of the hardest rockers they had recorded to that point. The piano-and-vocal introduction establishes the tone—this will not be polite—before May's guitar enters with a riff Mercury had originally sketched at the keyboard. The lyric pulls no punches: blood-sucking leeches, decaying sewer rats, and worse. Mercury sings it with enough venom that May reportedly felt uneasy about the words, but the performance never wavers. The arrangement is tight, the chorus hooks are strong, and the production captures the band at full force. It is both a statement of intent and a genuinely effective hard rock song, proof that the record's ambition would not come at the expense of intensity.

A one-minute vaudeville miniature sung entirely by Mercury with his voice recorded through a microphone pointed at a tin bucket, giving it a hollow megaphone tone. The lyric is light music-hall whimsy, the piano is period-appropriate, and the whole thing functions as a palate cleanser after the fury of the opening track. Baker recorded the guitar solo on the vocal track because they had run out of available tracks. It is clever and it does not overstay.

Taylor's first composition on a Queen album, initially dismissed as a joke by May until he heard the full arrangement. The song is a straightforward rocker with Taylor singing lead from the drum kit and May's guitar providing the main riff. The lyric is exactly what the title promises—a love song to a car, inspired by a roadie's devotion to his Triumph—and Taylor plays it straight. The Alfa Romeo engine sounds at the end are Taylor's own car. It works as a hard rock track and it served as the B-side to Bohemian Rhapsody, which later caused friction within the band because Taylor earned equal publishing royalties to Mercury despite the single's success being driven by the A-side. The song is well-constructed but not essential, a solid album track that benefits from Taylor's committed vocal.

Deacon's second song for the band and his first single, written for his wife while he was learning piano. He played the Wurlitzer electric piano himself—Mercury disliked the instrument—and overdubbed the bass later. The melody is warm and direct, the lyric is unpretentious, and the arrangement is clean enough to let the song breathe. It became a top ten hit in the UK and remains one of the band's most durable pop songs, proof that Deacon could write hooks that worked on radio without sounding calculated. The production is simpler than most of the album, which helps the song stand out in the sequence.

May's science-fiction sea shanty, told from the perspective of space explorers who return home after a year-long voyage to find a century has passed due to relativistic time dilation. The folk arrangement uses Deacon's double bass—learned at May's joking request—and May's acoustic guitar, with May singing lead on the album version. The melody is sturdy, the lyric is specific without overexplaining, and the song earns its conceit by treating it as an emotional story rather than a thought experiment. Mercury sang it live, and George Michael later cited it as his favourite Queen song. It is one of the album's most fully realised tracks, a song where the concept and the craft are inseparable.

A fast hard rocker in an unusual 3/4 time signature that shifts to 4/4 in the bridge. May wrote it, and the riff is competent, but the song does not develop the idea beyond the initial groove. It functions as a bridge between the folk intimacy of '39 and the vaudeville of Seaside Rendezvous, but on its own terms it is the weakest track on the first side. The time signature is interesting, the performance is tight, but the writing does not give the band enough to work with.

Mercury's music-hall pastiche, complete with a mock-instrumental bridge where he and Taylor use their voices to imitate clarinets, tubas, trumpets and kazoos, with Taylor hitting a C6 in the process. The tap-dance section was performed by tapping thimbles on the mixing desk. It is cleverly arranged and performed with commitment, but the novelty wears thin on repeat listens. Mercury plays both grand piano and jangle honky-tonk, and the whole thing feels like a sketch that was recorded with full production when a demo might have sufficed.

May's eight-minute prog epic, written after a dream about the Great Flood and structured around a vocal canon that uses tape delay to turn Mercury's voice into a self-harmonizing fugue. The first half builds tension through shifting dynamics and May's koto, the middle section is the a cappella vocal experiment, and the second half is instrumental guitar work that runs longer than the material justifies. The ambition is audible—the tape-delay canon required Baker and Stone to sync two reel-to-reel machines—but the song sags in the final minutes. It is Queen at their most progressive, for better and worse: technically impressive, conceptually interesting, and about two minutes too long.

Mercury's piano-and-vocal showcase, arranged by May to include harp overdubbed chord by chord and acoustic guitar. Mercury sings it with restraint, the classical piano solo in the middle is brief and elegant, and the production leaves space around the voice and instruments. It became a concert staple, especially in South America where audiences sang it back to Mercury loudly enough that he would stop singing and let them take over. The song has been covered widely, and it remains one of the band's most durable ballads. The writing is direct without being sentimental, and the performance is intimate without being precious.

May's Dixieland pastiche, played almost entirely on his Red Special through the Deacy Amp to recreate the sound of a jazz combo. May sings lead, plays ukulele, and overdubs the guitar parts to imitate clarinet, trombone and trumpet. Mercury does not appear on the track, one of the few Queen songs recorded without him. The writing is slight—a nostalgic lyric about aging—but the arrangement is the point. May's recreation of the Dixieland ensemble is both technically impressive and tonally accurate, and the song works as a brief interlude before the album's centrepiece. It is a novelty, but a well-executed one.

The album's centrepiece and the song that became Queen's signature, a six-minute multi-movement suite that moves from piano ballad to operatic theatre to hard rock without a conventional chorus. Mercury wrote it and brought it to the band in blocks, sketching the guitar solo for May and writing the vocal arrangements on a phonebook using note names instead of notation. The operatic section—originally intended as a short interlude—grew into a dense ensemble of multitracked voices invoking Scaramouche, Galileo, Figaro and Beelzebub, with over a hundred vocal overdubs pushing the 24-track tape to near transparency. The band recorded their parts without knowing how the final mix would assemble them. Baker and Stone's production is the album's peak: the vocal stacks are clear, the transitions between sections are seamless, and the hard rock finale lands with full force after the operatic excess. The song was twice as long as the average 1975 single and initially received mixed reviews, but it topped the UK chart for nine weeks and became one of the most widely recognised recordings in rock history. The writing is theatrical but never aimless—the operatic middle serves as the emotional pivot between the ballad and the hard rock, and the structure makes sense as drama even when it defies pop convention. Mercury's vocal performance carries the song, from the intimate opening to the operatic histrionics to the final resigned lines. May's guitar solo in the hard rock section is one of his most memorable, and Taylor's drumming in that section drives the song to its conclusion. It is the album's thesis made audible: bombast and precision working together.

May's instrumental arrangement of the British national anthem, recorded a year earlier at Trident Studios and added to close the album. He played a guide piano that was edited out later, then layered multiple guitar tracks to create the orchestration. It became a concert coda for nearly every Queen show afterward, and May later performed it on the roof of Buckingham Palace during the Queen's Golden Jubilee. As an album closer it works as a statement of Britishness and as a brief palate cleanser after Bohemian Rhapsody. It is not a song—it is a signature.