Searching For Operatic Transcendence In Heavy Metal Music

I've always felt drawn to metal music, even though I haven't managed to listen to that much of it.

I studied classical piano, so most of my music budget used to go to pieces I might play. (I'm old enough that this was back in the day when you actually had to pay for music.) But there was an energy to much of the stuff that my "less cultured" schoolmates listened to which was not so different from the passion and fire I felt when I listened to a dramatic classical piece. And sometimes an electric guitar was just a more direct connection to the kind of intense emotional response that music - all music - is about.

Take, for example, this performance of the final movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" by French guitarist Tina S:

There was always a great deal of talent in metal that didn't really get the credit it deserved. Artists like Ozzy Osbourne and Yngwie Malmsteen might have seemed like they were off their rockers, but there was no denying they had technical abilities which had taken a lifetime of focus and dedication to develop.

More recently, Emilie Autumn has done some things with her electric violin which are mind-blowingly badass. Her album Laced/Unlaced is proof that an artist can perform equally exciting music in both styles. The first half of that album is traditional chamber music, the second the sort of over-the-top-sexy stuff you see below.

There seem to be as many genres of metal as there were species of trilobites in the Cambrian Explosion. Grindcore? Crossover Thrash? Pirate Metal? Erm... Pornogrind? Actually I wonder if musical taxonomists have just assigned every band out there to its own subgenre.

The biggest turnoff for me, and the element I keep running into, is the guttural throat-singing that so many of these bands seem to employ. They get a good riff going, they start winding me up with that frantic beat (hey - it turns out this isn't bad for fending off narcoleptic sleep-attacks), and then they break in with something that sounds like a constipated frog belching across the instrumentation.

This is clearly just a matter of taste, since this performance by Aetherian has over a million views. Maybe you'll like it.

This being the age of the internet, though, and there being so much of this stuff out there, it seems like I should be able to order up something more to my taste. I've done some searches for symphonic metal and opera metal, and found things that come close, but to be honest most of the stuff classified as "melodic" sounds like the same mass-produced four-chord corporate-manufactured pap we get from pop music - just with a faster tempo and lots of distortion. Evanescence is supposed to be metal? Give me a break. You might as well argue that Baby Metal is edgy and rebellious, and not just factory-fed J-pop teens in black leather skirts.

What I'm looking for is a powerful, well trained voice, probably female, probably soprano, with the raw vocal power to stand up to all that noise and elevate it with something otherworldly and intense. So much metal instrumentation is Wagnerian in scope (if not always in complexity) that it really deserves a voice to match it.

A voice like my new favorite opera singer, Barbara Hannigan. Seriously, if you watch only one of these embedded videos, check out this performance of contemporary composer Ligeti. Talk about someone who can flirt with chaos in a performance while maintaining perfect control! (And in five-inch heels.)

Diamanda Galas is up there in the ranks, too, as perhaps the most "metal" singer who has never performed heavy metal music. She's a classicly trained singer, but she's practiced and cataloged several dozen different screaming techniques so that she can perform them with absolute fidelity. She's also a tremendous pianist, as you can hear below. This piece does a good job showcasing her more traditional range with lots of her more "experimental" techniques.

So, yeah - I'm still fascinated by metal, and still convinced there has to be a group out there that combines the raw energy of metal instrumentation with vocals that can elevate it to the respect it deserves - or at least satisfy the peculiarly specific cravings of my ear-holes.

C'mon, internet. This is the niche I'm looking for. Will you help me find it? Or do I have to learn the guitar, find an opera singer, and make it myself?