Beloved Antichrist by Therion was released on February 9th
Therion's new album, Beloved Antichrist , was released in February as a triple album, lasting approximately 3 hours, and is based on Vladimir Solovyov's work, A Short Tale Of The Antichrist. The band's leader, Christofer Johnsson, discussed the album in an interview with Skull Banger.
“First of all, it’s not really an album, it’s a musical. You can buy many musicals on CD. You can buy Phantom of the Opera on CD, but it’s not an album. I think it’s very important to understand that. We had very good reviews, and the ones that weren’t good were because they didn’t understand and thought we made a three-hour album, and we didn’t. To fully understand, I think you have to see the musical. The concept came in 2003 when I wanted to do a classical opera, and I wanted to do it in some kind of classical literature because it’s very difficult to create a new and very good story about opera. I wanted to do it in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, but I realized that story is too complex for an opera. I thought it was a bit over the top, so I tried to choose something simple. I was into Russian literature. I thought, ‘Maybe Soloviev – A Short Tale of the Antichrist. That should be good.’ That’s how I started working on it, but then I realized the story wasn’t very good for the theatre, so we changed a lot. We We changed the character, we changed the beginning, we changed the ending, and we changed a lot in the middle. It would be more accurate to say that it's partially based on it than inspired by it. There are some, like three or four scenes, that are exactly the same as in the book. There are some characters that are exactly as they are in the book, but if you read the book and then see the musical, you won't recognize most of them.”
Therion is coming to Brazil for three shows along with Cellar Darling, a band formed by former members of Eluveitie. Click here to read more.
