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A Night at the Opera (Queen album)

1975 studio album by Queen

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 22, 2026
Entity authorityQ193477 ↗
Source-derived summary

A Night at the Opera is the fourth studio album by the British rock band Queen, released on 28 November 1975, by EMI Records in the United Kingdom and Elektra Records in the United States. Produced by Roy Thomas Baker and Queen, it was reportedly the most expensive album ever recorded at the time of its release.

Named after the Marx Brothers' film of the same name, A Night at the Opera was recorded at various studios across a four-month period in 1975. Due to management issues, Queen had received almost none of the money they earned for their previous albums. Subsequently, they ended their contract with Trident Studios and did not use their studios for the album (the sole exception being "God Save the Queen", which had been recorded the previous year). They employed a complex production that extensively used multitrack recording, and the songs incorporated a wide range of styles, such as ballads, music hall, sea shanties, dixieland, hard rock and progressive rock influences. Aside from their usual equipment, Queen also utilised a diverse range of instruments such as a double bass, harp, ukulele and more.

Upon release, A Night at the Opera became Queen's first number-one album in the UK, topping the UK Albums Chart for four non-consecutive weeks. It peaked at number four on the US Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart and became the band's first Platinum-certified album in the US. It also produced the band's most successful single in the UK, "Bohemian Rhapsody", which became their first number-one song in the country. Despite being twice as long as the average length of singles during the 1970s, the song became immensely popular worldwide.

Editorial summary

“A Night at the Opera (Queen album)” enters the record as 1975 studio album by Queen. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Night, Opera and Queen can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1975—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1975-11-21. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Night, Opera and Queen.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“A Night at the Opera (Queen album)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Night, Opera and Queen provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q193477. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1975.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “A Night at the Opera (Queen album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.