"Memento mori" from Kamelot: an analysis

The American band, Kamelot, with this theme "Memento Mori", as an opera, takes up the maxims of German romanticism. This theme among the others that make up the conceptual album "The Black Halo", are inspired by the cusp of the literary genre mentioned, specifically in the work of "The Faust" by Goethe. The piece of music rescues the Baroque in terms of form and composition. The opera elements act in the need to represent the last moments of Faust before falling into madness and being dragged by the demon Mephistopheles to which he sold his soul.

However, there is a key differentiation between the original work and the composition of Kamelot, and that is that in the first, Faust dies when the deal is fulfilled at the moment when his own lips pronounce: "instant, stop ... you are so beautiful" , whereas in the musical work, the same character wishes that his life would be extinguished after having reconciled with God, and that this action would be carried out when it is the same cold breeze of winter that will close his eyes. This allusion, on the other hand, takes up what the philosopher of that country, Walter Benjamin, would define in his work "The origin of the German drama", as the characteristic "unitary" of the melancholic prince.

It is also necessary to mention the literary quality of the album as a whole to the complex, dark and well-worn sound of the music, together with the high and low tones of the voices of Roy Khan and Simone Simons (Epica). The composition does not have a moral or a cliché message, much less plagued by common places such as "work in such a way", "do this and not that", like some other bands of "gothic" nuances, but in this particular song , we are shown Faust's pain consummated by his own melancholy and longing for knowledge that took him away from God when Khan sings in English "the more we know, the more we miss", remembering that the protagonist sold his soul in exchange for obtaining knowledge. In addition, the writing of the composition reminds Hamlet when Faust, yearning for Helena's love, prefers to die as a symptom of something that Shakespeare would have said in the following way: "In the eyes of the melancholic, the sexed body acquires the appearance of a corpse in putrefaction".

Finally, "Memento Mori" is a Latin phrase that can be translated as «remember that you will die», being death (mori) a reminder (memento) of the mortal condition of the human being, very common said to the politicians and military of the Classic era, with the vapors of greatness up to the head, you had to remind them what would be their end.

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