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Rock Opera

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"You're suddenly rather grateful of the explicatory notes — making sense has never been foremost on Townshend's list of rock-opera priorities."
— Alexis Petridis on The Who's Endless Wire

The Rock Opera is a rock Concept Album taken to its logical conclusion: telling a single, complete story mostly—if not entirely—sung from one or more characters' points of view.

The "opera"-ness of the form varies significantly. Some present the point of view of a single (possibly unnamed) character, while others have explicitly-named characters interacting with each other in song (and likely performed by different singers). The Other Wiki's entry for Tommy suggests that "rock cantata" or "rock song cycle" might be a more accurate term, since a rock opera is purely a musical performance that is not necessarily intended to be staged or acted out. This is odd, since Tommy was the first widely heard Rock Opera, and was farther on the opera side of this scale.

Especially popular rock operas tend to get adapted as The Musical, although as there may be staging difficulties or only one or two characters with singing parts, changes are often made. A few skip the whole "concept album" phase and are written explicitly for the stage.

This sometimes marks the Jumping the Shark point of the band or the band's dissolution, especially if only one musician wants to do a rock opera and the others don't. (See: Styx.)

A recent subgenre of the Rock Opera is the Urban Opera or "hip-hopera", concept albums and musicals telling stories using hip-hop instead of rock music. A well-known example of hip-hopera would be R. Kelly's epic, ongoing "Trapped in the Closet", with 33 chapters and counting. However, rappers are more likely to have a story-telling song or two on each album than dedicate one entirely.

Not to be confused with the Black Mages' version of the opera from Final Fantasy VI in their third album, Darkness and Starlight, wherein they set the operatic (Japanese) lyrics from the original game to a blistering heavy metal interpretation of the original music — though this only constitutes a single 15-minute track from the album.

Rock Operas with their own pages:

Other examples:

  • Days of Rising Doom by the supergroup Aina, bonus points as it was their only album.
  • Arkaik started an ongoing conceptual saga with Metamorphignition involving Cyrix, a monk on a magical planet ruled by a mage dictatorship that severs the populace from its innate gifts via Anti-Magic.
    • Metamorphigition: Cyrix attempts to commit suicide via self-immolation, only to have his consciousness shunted into an alternate reality, where he is greeted by several fae-like spirits who show him visions of the ills of the world, and then by the Omnipus, a cephalopoid god who shows him the nature of creation and informs him of his status as The Chosen One.
    • Lucid Dawn: Cyrix emerges from his visions with knowledge of his purpose and begins to gather his forces and awaken the populace to the true nature of the world they live in, which ends in an uprising that destroys one of the main Anti-Magic-generating temples.
    • Nemethia: Cyrix is contacted by an enclave of banished mystics who knew of the prophecy of The Chosen One and sat in hiding waiting for them to manifest, who hold the magic necessary for the safe use of a dimensional portal that Cyrix needs to be able to access in order to ascend to the level of power necessary to achieve his mission.
  • The second side of Hounds of Love by Kate Bush consists of The Ninth Wave, a mini-rock opera about a woman struggling to survive while lost at sea.
  • Pretty much every album by Coheed and Cambria tells the story of The Armory Wars (the band name itself is part of the plot).
  • Ashtray Rock by the Joel Plaskett Emergency has an atypically simple plot for a rock opera: two guys fight over a girl and break up their band.
  • The album Elodia by goth band Lacrimosa. It's a story of a couple getting estranged then back together.
  • Ambo by Robyn Miller and Keith Moore. Seen here.
  • Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), Preservation Act 1, Preservation Act 2, Soap Opera, and Schoolboys in Disgrace by The Kinks.
  • Savatage released three rock operas: Streets: A Rock Opera, Dead Winter Dead, and The Wake of Magellan. A song off Dead Winter Dead, "Christmas Eve / Sarajevo 12/24", became a surprise hit and inspired them to experiment further with the style, leading to...
  • Trans-Siberian Orchestra. TSO exists to write rock operas, most of which are Christmas themed. Their rock operas are Christmas Eve and Other Stories (1996), The Christmas Attic (1998), Beethoven's Last Night (2000), and The Lost Christmas Eve (2004). The aforementioned "Christmas Eve / Sarajevo 12/24" is now universally known as a TSO song.
  • Baltimore Rock Opera Society: A Maryland theater troupe of young artists and musicians who put together wholly original rock operas designed to be the craziest type of theater experience ever conceived.
  • The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance
  • Blows Against the Empire by Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane was one of the earliest, released in 1970, only a year after Tommy. It is the story of how a rag-tag band of hippies hijack a starship, and was nominated for a Hugo Award as best science-fiction work of the year in the "dramatic presentation" category—usually reserved for movies.
  • The Broken Bride by Ludo (known usually for songs such as "Love Me Dead" and "Good Will Hunting By Myself") is the heartrending, mindboggling journey of a grieving scientist who travels through time to try and save his dead wife, fighting pterodactyls and zombies along the way.
  • So Far From Home, The Light Of Things Hoped For, and Anti-Meridian by Brave Saint Saturn all tell the story of a NASA mission to Saturn that goes the way of Apollo 13.
  • A Christmas Carol by Majestica is, well, Yet Another Christmas Carol in the form of a Power Metal album, telling the complete Dickens narrative set to medleys of Christmas carols.
  • The Chronicle of the Black Sword by Hawkwind, based on Elric of Melnibone and composed with Michael Moorcock's cooperation
  • The Crimson Idol and The Neon God by WASP
  • Dark Sarah's entire concept. The band's albums tell a continuous story of a woman named Sarah who begins having a series of fantastical adventures after being left at the altar by her fiance.
  • "David Comes to Life" by Fucked Up tells the story of David, who discovers love of life after falling in love with Veronica. Their relationship causes some drama in his life, and they ultimately break up, but David grows from the experience.
  • Death Revenge by Exhumed, about the "career" of Burke and Hare.
  • Le dimensioni del mio caos, by rapper Caparezza. A time traveling hippie ends up conforming to modern society, and the album ends with an alternate history where prehistoric Bonobos surpass humans on the evolutionary scale.
  • Dead Beat, by Rufus Rex.
  • Dreams In The Witch House, by Platform Studios, Polar Studios and the HP Lovecraft Historical Society.
  • Every single GWAR album. Significant in that several albums have corresponding movies:
    • America Must Be Destroyed has the movie Phallus in Wonderland
    • This Toilet Earth has Skulhedface
    • Rag Na Rok has Rendezvous with RagNaRok
    • Carnival of Chaos has Dawn of the Day of the Night of the Penguins
  • Hair by Ragni, Rado and McDermott was released as a Rock Opera after success as a Musical.
  • Hedwig and the Angry Inch
  • The Bastard, by progressive metal band Hammers of Misfortune.
  • Hero is a Christian rock opera that asks "What if Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania?". It notably featured a number of major players in the Christian Rock world, such as former dcTalk member and current Newsboys frontrunner Michael Tait as the title character, along with John Cooper of Skillet, Audio Adrenaline's Mark Stuart, and Rebecca St. James.
  • Invisible Circles by After Forever, which tells a story about a dysfunctional marriage..
  • The Iron Man, by Pete Townshend, based on the children's book known in the US as The Iron Giant
  • Iron Savior began as a one-off concept album featuring three German metal musicians, then eventually became a band in its own right, with each album continuing a storyline revolving around a giant self-aware biomechanical spacecraft that was created to defend ancient Atlantis. Making them perhaps literally a Space Opera.
  • Jesus Christ Superstar, by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, began life as a Rock Opera, with Deep Purple's Ian Gillan as Jesus, Murray Head as Judas and Yvonne Elliman as Mary.
  • Aside from Frank Zappa's albums mentioned above, other examples of rock operas within individual albums invlude "Billy the Mountain" on Just Another Band from L.A., "The Adventures of Greggery Peccary" on Studio Tan and Läther, and the seven minute mini-rock opera "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" from Absolutely Free.
  • Lifehouse, initiated by The Who in 1970, ultimately released 30 years later as a Pete Townshend solo album. (Note that Townshend was quite prolific in this genre.) The aborted Who version of Lifehouse is considered by Townshend to form a trilogy with Psychoderelict and Wire and Glass, each of which feature Author Avatar Ray High in different stages of his career.
  • Hiroshima is a Rock Opera about the titular nuclear bombing made by Ludwig Von 88.
  • Meat Loaf had two 10-minute operatic suites on his Bat Out of Hell album; the title track, which songwriter Jim Steinman described as "the ultimate car crash song", and Paradise on the Dashboard Light, which he described as "the ultimate car sex song". Much of the rest of his music has an operatic feel to it, if not necessarily a narrative progression, resulting in the term "Wagnerian rock" being coined to describe him.
    • For good reason: Certain songs on the album were scavenged and rearranged from demos for a sadly-never-produced Peter Pan musical.
  • Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory and The Astonishing by Dream Theater
    • And the title track (i.e. entire second disc) of their Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence album.
  • Moonrise by The L-Train is a twenty-six-minute symphonic metal opera which retells the story of Nightmare Moon from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
  • Nightfall in Middle-Earth by Blind Guardian is somewhere between a Concept Album and a Rock Opera adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, with operatic metal vocals and spoken interludes.
  • Nostradamus by Judas Priest
  • The Novelist by Richard Swift is a surprisingly short example, taking only 27 minutes to tell the story of a writer undergoing a nervous breakdown.
  • Operation: Mindcrime, and its sequel Operation: Mindcrime II by Queensrÿche
  • Tyranny by Shadow Gallery
  • Room V by Shadow Gallery
  • Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü
  • Hope Rides Alone and The Father of Death by The Protomen, two parts of an in-progress rock opera trilogy based on Mega Man.
  • Psychoderelict, by Pete Townshend
  • The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, Radio KAOS, and Amused to Death, by Roger Waters
  • Separation Sunday - The Hold Steady.
  • Seventh Son of a Seventh Son by Iron Maiden. There's also the saga of Charlotte the Harlot, which is spread over four albums.
    • If the Charlotte series counts, throw Overkill's "Overkill" songs in too. They're currently five songs in.
  • The oft forgotten S.F. Sorrow by the '60s British group, The Pretty Things. S.F. Sorrow tells the story of Sebastian F. Sorrow, who endures World War I, and then returns to his love, who is killed in a the crash of The Hindenburg. Sorrow falls into a severe state of depression, and is then taken on a journey by the mythical Baron Saturday. The Baron throws Sorrow into a room of mirrors, where he sees the horrible truths and revelations of his life, ending with Sorrow secluding himself from society and building a mental and emotional wall. And this was ten years before Roger Waters had even thought of The Wall yet. Notable for being considered one of the first Rock Operas. Produced at Abbey Road, during the same time The Beatles were recording Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pink Floyd were recording The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
  • The Story of Simon Simopath, a 1967 album by Nirvana (not that Nirvana, the British psychedelic band), is said by The Other Wiki to be the earliest example of a rock album containing a single unified narrative.
  • Space Crackers, by indie band Clawjob.
  • Tommy by The Who, in reference to which the term "rock opera" was coined.
    • Quadrophenia was their second rock opera. Who's Next started out as a rock opera too. They have also done many mini operas, such as the recent Wire And Glass or the early A Quick One.
  • Traveller by Slough Feg
  • The Unforgiving by Within Temptation.
  • White City, by Pete Townshend
  • Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, a 1978 adaptation of the classic novel, arranged by producer Jeff Wayne and featuring an all-star cast consisting of Richard Burton, Justin Hayward, David Essex, and numerous others. There is also his less well-known work Spartacus.
  • Charlemagne: by the Sword and the Cross is a Symphonic Metal Rock Opera Concept Album about the life of the Holy Roman Emperor, with Christopher Lee singing the title role! A Heavy Metal sequel, The Omens of Death, is set for release in May 2013.
  • Iced Earth's album The Dark Saga is a Rock Opera retelling of Spawn's Origin Story.
    • There's also the more recent two-part Something Wicked: Framing Armageddon: Something Wicked, Part 1, and The Crucible of Man: Something Wicked, Part 2.
    • And let's not forget their first rock opera, Night of the Stormrider.
  • Rhapsody (later Rhapsody of Fire) has two Rock Operas. The first is the Emerald Sword Saga, a fantasy story to find the titular sword to defeat the Evil Overlord, consists of Rhapsody's first five albums ("Legendary Tales", "Symphony of Enchanted Lands", "Dawn of Victory", "Rain of a Thousand Flames", and "Power of the Dragonflame"). The second is the Dark Secret Saga - a rather Tolkien-esque journey to destroy the Dark Lord Nekron's power - that spreads out over five albums ("Symphony of Enchanted Lands II: The Dark Secret", "Triumph Or Agony", "The Frozen Tears of Angels", "The Cold Embrace of Fear: A Dark Romantic Symphony", and "From Chaos to Eternity), is narrated by Christopher Lee, and set in the same universe as the Emerald Sword Saga and occasionally references the events of the saga. Together, they are referred to as "The Algalord Chronicles".
  • King Diamond is to horror what Rhapsody of Fire is to fantasy. All but two of their albums tell a story and there are several stories that span multiple albums.
  • Prince Paul's A Prince Among Thieves, notable for being the most high-profile (if not the first) rap opera.
    • Preceding it (but with not much commercial success) was On And On, a "rappera" made in 1989 by the Fat Boys.
  • A notable failure would be 1981's Music from "The Elder" by Kiss, which flopped commercially, causing the planned tour and feature film to be cancelled, alienated much of the band's fanbase (those who hadn't already given up on the group after a set of subpar solo albums, a cheesy over-the-top TV movie, a switch to cartoonish superhero-like costumes, two straight disco records and the departure of drummer Peter Criss) and led to the departure of founding lead guitarist Ace Frehley, who opposed the idea of a concept album from the start and hardly appears on it.
  • Clone High did an episode that was billed as a Rock Opera. Jack Black basically convinces all the kids that smoking raisins gets you high, with the typical "dangers of drugs" story as a result. It was very trippy and paid tribute to Tommy and The Beatles a couple of times. The music was actually pretty good.
  • Repo! The Genetic Opera started as a ten minute opera, then was upgraded to a full length stage show, and was also made into a rock opera film.
  • Street Fight Round 1 by Man Factory, a musical roughly based around the plot of the street fighter game series, it's available on their myspace. Round 2 has been released, continuing the story of the first.
    • Round 3 was released during the last days of 2013, concluding the trilogy.
  • Kamelot did this with their twin albums Epica and Black Halo, which retell the story of Faust to melodic metal. They also have one set in Victorian Britain, called Silverthorn.
  • Deltron 3030 by band of the same name is about an intergalactic fight to save hip-hop
  • The Hungarian hit István, a király ("Stephen the king").
  • "Tickle Monsters Are Robots", an oddly dark sci-fi epic written by a five-year-old.
  • These Are Not My Pants by Christian band Five Iron Frenzy is a parodic rock opera about a person wearing pants of unknown origin.
  • Misty Beethoven: The Musical! is a rock-opera remake of 70's porn The Opening of Misty Beethoven, which was in turn based on the musical My Fair Lady.=
  • The Decemberists have a mini-rock opera in The Crane Wife, which isn't quite a concept album, but features three tracks that together tell the story of a Japanese folk tale; it also has "The Island," a 12-and-a-half minute retelling of William Shakespeare's The Tempest. The Hazards of Love, however, is a full-blown rock opera concept album about a romance between William (A man that, as a child, was adopted by the Queen of the taiga and turned into a shapeshifting white fawn) and Margaret. Their romance is threatened by the aforementioned Queen (Who is angry at her adopted son having impregnated Margaret), and by a murderous scoundrel called the Rake, who simply wants to kidnap, rape, and presumably murder Margaret. Hopefully in that order. On the way, William and Margaret are aided by the spirits of the forest, and the vengeful ghosts of the Rake's murdered children. William and Margaret die anyway.
  • Fear Factory's Obsolete album depicts a dystopian future where man is ruled by machines and the struggle against it.
  • Fireaxe are a Power/Thrash metal band consisting soley of Brian Voth on every instrument. Every album is a rock opera but their most epic example has to be their 2003, 3 disc, 4 hour magnum opus Food for the Gods. Every track tells a chapter in the history of humanity and the way our beliefs in various gods shape it. As deities come and go people fight and battle eachother, pay tribute and devote their lives to their glory. The whole thing culminates with a Rage Against the Heavens of such epic porportions that no other form of media has ever matched it. And the best part? All of Fireaxe's music is public domain and can be downloaded legally for free.
  • The Hold Steady, while never going so far as to write a full-on Rock Opera have such an incestuous musical canon that you could probably construct one with minimal effort and at least one album seems dedicated to the experiences of 'Holly', a Catholic schoolgirl in way over her head with the local indie/druggie scene.
  • Depending on who you ask, Tool's Lateralus
  • Excluding the eponimous Mägo de Oz, La Bruja, and Belfast all Mägo de Oz albums are this. In fact Gaia, Gaia II: La Voz Dormida and Gaia III: Atlantia form a trilogy
  • Rick Wakeman had the chutzpah to make a musical version of ... Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell! Recommended for aficionados of Rock Opera. Wakeman's discography also includes rock operas based on Journey To The Center Of The Earth and Arthurian Legend, along with an instrumental Concept Album about the wives of Henry VIII.
  • 10cc's One Night In Paris is a mini-rock-opera (about 10 minutes long) regarding an American tourist's experiences in the French capital.
  • In Home Movies, garage band SCAB does a rock opera based on Franz Kafka, with specific focus on his novella The Metamorphosis including the ballad "Living Like A Bug Ain't Easy". Brendon also films a rock opera "Timmy" an affectionate parody of The Who's Tommy.
  • To a certain extent, the Madness album The Liberty of Norton Folgate could be considered as one (although the songs aren't technically rock). The first track is called Overture, which introduces a lot of the melodic ideas which appear later on and leads directly into We Are London. Most of the songs on the album - such as Sugar and Spice and NW 5 - tell stories about either growing up in London or travelling through London (except for Africa, which instead ends with an instrumental extract of the title track). The Liberty of Norton Folgate itself is a ten minute long story about the sights, sounds and history of the eponymous area of London.
  • RENT was a highly successful rock opera.
  • Casey Crescenzo (formerly of The Receiving End of Sirens) has a side-project-turned-main-project called The Dear Hunter that tells the story of the titular Dear Hunter. Six acts are planned, each act as a separate album (with the exception of Act I, which is an EP). Three acts are currently released.
  • The first two albums by Dragonland fall under this category.
  • Berlin by Lou Reed.
  • The Ghost Ship demos EP, re-released in 2008 as Phantom on the Horizon, tells the tale of a Spanish Galleon meeting with a ghost ship from another dimension.
  • Mozart L'Opera Rock (Mozart: a Rock Opera in English) by French composer Dove Attia, claims to be exactly what it is, a rock-opera biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
  • Orgy's Vapor Transmission is somewhere between this and a Concept Album, telling a science-fiction space adventure story that is apparently based on people and situations that the band members really knew and saw. The only thing that makes it walk the line with concept album is that it isn't clear if the protagonist of later songs really is Suckerface, the identity of the female characters after Fiction is unclear, and there's one song about a friend of the band's mother that nonetheless talks about computery themes.
  • Tallahassee by the Mountain Goats is an entire album that tells the story of a married couple who move into a slummy house in Florida. As their marriage swiftly turns from troubled to a drinking game to see who dies first, the house begins decaying rapidly until it burns down with them as they happily embrace death.
  • Anathallo's album Floating World included "Hanasakajiji", a four-part adaptation of the Japanese folk tale "Old Man Cherry-Blossom".
  • Legend of the Bone Carver by Pyramaze. It tells an epic story of a Child that grows up in the comfort of nature, grow outside his surroundings and witness the horrors that evil and darkness have wrought upon the earth, and fulfill a prophecy to bring good and evil back into balance.
  • Vanden Plas' last two, Christ 0 and Seraphic Clockwork, fit the bill, as does lead singer Andy Kuntz's side project Abydos.
  • Saviour Machine is three albums into their Legend series, which goes through the book of Revelation.
  • And then there's Cage's Hell Destroyer, which is like the book of Revelation filtered through a comic book.
  • Amaseffer's Slaves For Life is based on the Exodus.
  • Orphaned Land's Mabool is based on Noah's Ark and various other ancient flood stories.
  • Jag Panzer had Thane to the Throne, an adaptation of Macbeth.
  • Virgin Steele have several rock operas under their belt... pretty much everything from Invictus on.
  • Ahab's 2 albums to date have both been rock operas. Crushingly heavy funeral doom rock operas, but rock operas nonetheless. And given the band's name, it shouldn't be too hard to guess their favorite theme.
  • Janelle Monáe's Metropolis Suite is a four-suite tale with inspirations in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, telling the story of android Cindi Mayweather on the run from the civic authorities of a futuristic city for falling in love with a human.
  • Unusually for a grindcore band, Pig Destroyer have three full albums that could qualify, though "grind tragedy" would probably be a more accurate term for them.
    • The album Terrifyer is, if not a rock opera, certainly a sequential narrative. It details the narrator's obsession with Natasha, the 'Terrifyer' of the title.
    • The bonus disc to Terrifyer is a single 38-minute doom metal song entitled "Natasha", which is musically much more reminiscent of traditional rock operas with its use of sound effects, division into multiple distinct movements, varied vocal styles, and more explicit narrative. Lyrically, it's essentially an extended ghost story about a man who murders the titular Natasha after he learns she's been cheating on him in their relationship, and revisits the scene of the crime years later to make a disturbing discovery. It's pretty much totally unique in their discography, but structurally it seems to owe a bit to Devil Doll.
    • The band's prior album, Prowler in the Yard, has a very similar concept, telling of a man's complete mental and physical decay following a traumatic breakup with a girl named Jennifer. Notably features Book Ends to the story in the form of a bizarre and disturbing monologue read by Microsoft Sam, the meaning of which in relation to the rest of the narrative is unclear.
  • Colonel Jeffery Pumpernickel: A Concept Album is unusual for being both an original rock opera and a various artists compilation: Chris Slusarenko came up with a thoroughly confusing version of the standard rock opera plot, then got indie rock acts like Guided by Voices, Stephen Malkmus, and Grandaddy to write and perform songs based around it.
  • Willie Nelson's ''Red Headed Stranger surely counts as a Country Opera...
  • Fagen's Kamakiriad. A 20 Minutes into the Future album about a man and his car.
  • Kitchens of Distinction's Death Of Cool is arguably a Rock Opera. This is unconfirmed as the lyrics in the songs seem to be telling a story, but lead singer Patrick Fitzgerald has yet to say. It seems to be telling the story of a young man growing up in the wake of the AIDS epidemic.
  • Sound Horizon has created a number of these, such as Moira and Marchen.
  • Tom Russell wrote one of the most famous folk operas of the 1990s, his 1999 release The Man From Nowhere. It took him 10 years to write, tracing his family tree back over a hundred years to do so, but boy does it pay off. Each and every character is developed in an incredibly strong way, and the lyrics have amazing effort put into them.
  • The cut Villain Song "Biggering" from The Lorax (2012).
  • The Divine Conspiracy by Epica could also qualify. It's a concept album that turns around the concept of religion from the view of a character.
  • Greendale by Neil Young, which has also been adapted into a film and a Graphic Novel.
  • "Cash Cow (A Rock Opera In Three Small Acts)" by Steve Taylor claims to be one, but it's only 5 minutes long and most of the story can be understood within the music itself.
  • "Fight Like A Girl" by Emilie Autumn. Well, more like industrial/dark cabaret/classical/riot grrl/classic rock/showtunes opera. It's an adaptation of Autumn's own novel The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls.
  • Into the Lair of the Sun God by Dawnbringer is a nine-untitled track album about a story of a young warrior with no quest to fulfil so he takes on a quest created by his own mind to defeat the sun.
  • Something Broke, a 15-minute long musical adaptation of the infamous My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles) that expands on why Pinkie Pie decided to torture and cook Rainbow Dash.
  • The concept was spoofed several times during the Host Segments of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
  • mothy—almost every song he's ever written is part of a massive storyline (called the Evillious Chronicles) which spans over 1000 years. There are tie-in novels, manga, and short stories to explain each song. The story is...complicated.
  • The Last Temptation is collaboration between Alice Cooper and Neil Gaiman consisting of a rock opera Concept Album by Cooper and a comic book by Gaiman.
  • Speaking of Alice Cooper, he's no stranger to rock operas, with albums such as Welcome to My Nightmare and its sequel Welcome 2 My Nightmare, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell and Along Came A Spider.
  • Rugrats featured an in-universe example with Raptar On Ice.
  • Metalocalypse has The Doomstar Requiem: A Klok Opera, which was simultaneously created as a 1 hour special episode and album, with the album available shortly after its airing.
  • Destiny: A Tale of Unicorn Wings, the longest single-artist album in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom, revolving around Twilight Sparkle's transformation into an alicorn and how she deals with it.
  • Abigail by King Diamond tells a horror story about the rebirth of a stillborn demon baby from an unfaithful wife, who was pushed down the stairs by her husband.
  • Saban Entertainment released the soundtrack Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Album - A Rock Adventure, which told an altered and condensed version of the season 2 three-parter "The Mutiny"
  • Blessed He With Boils by California-based Black Metal band Xanthochroid which tells the story of two estranged brothers, one of whom has risen to power while the other struggles to dethrone him. The story takes place within the band's self-created fantasy world of Etymos, and their 2011 EP Incultus serves as a prequel.
  • Stephen The King (also known as Music/IstvánAKirály) by Levente Szörényi, which tells the story of Koppány’s rebellion against István who’d become the first king of Hungary.
  • At the time of his death in a plane crash in 1982; Contemporary Christian artist Keith Green was working on a rock opera based on various stories and parables from The Bible. Two of the songs (the "Prodigal Son Suite" and "On the Road to Jericho" {based on the parable of the Good Samaritan)} would eventually be released on two posthumously released albums alongside other songs that had been recorded but hadn't yet been released at the time of Green's death.
  • Genius: A Rock Opera by Daniele Liverani. It's about a boy named Genius who gets transported into the world of dreams. There are three "episodes" or albums. Episode 1: A Human Into Dreams' World, Episode 2: In Search Of The Little Prince, and Episode 3: The Final Surprise.
  • Les Friction is a rock band where the story begins in the 2040s. Humanity has begun to travel to other dimensions. Many prefer traveling to these other dimensions but, back on Earth, anarchy has spread amongst the remainders of humanity.
  • The entire ouvre of Gloryhammer is a three-album rock opera, chronicling the thousand-year, galaxy-spanning struggle between the Forces of Justice, led by House McFife, the kings of Dundee, and the the Dark Wizard Zargothrax of Auchtermuchty and his Forces of Evil. It is exactly as stupidly awesome and awesomely stupid as it sounds.
  • The Mechanisms' albums are all Rock Operas retelling mythology in a science fiction context. The songs are interspersed with spoken word narration to make the plot clearer.

 
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Majestica - "Ghost of Marley"

Majestica's eighth studio album A Christmas Carol retells the Dickens story as a power metal opera. Here, frontman Tommy Johansson plays the role of Scrooge in his fateful encounter with the condemned ghost of his business partner Jacob Marley.

Example of:
Yet Another Christmas Carol

Repo! The Genet...

"The Bloody Ver...

Alternative Title(s): Rock Operas

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Majestica - "Ghost of Marley"

Majestica's eighth studio album A Christmas Carol retells the Dickens story as a power metal opera. Here, frontman Tommy Johansson plays the role of Scrooge in his fateful encounter with the condemned ghost of his business partner Jacob Marley.

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Majestica - "Gh...

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