Tuomas Holopainen

Tuomas Holopainen is the founder, keyboardist and composer of Nightwish — and, in practice, the author of everything the band has recorded. Born in Kitee, Finland, in 1976, he formed the group in 1996 as an acoustic project with Tarja Turunen and Emppu Vuorinen, with no intention of making metal at all. His writing does not come from metal, and that is what explains Nightwish. Holopainen composes with film music in mind: developed orchestral themes, string and choir arrangements written as a score, long structures built in movements rather than verse and chorus. The references he cites are soundtrack composers, not guitarists, and the result is a band in which the guitar often occupies less space than the orchestra. He also writes the lyrics, which deal with nature, science and wonder rather than the genre's usual themes. Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2015) takes its title from a phrase of Charles Darwin's and features the biologist Richard Dawkins narrating passages — a metal album about evolution, made with conceptual seriousness. Outside the band he recorded Music Inspired by the Life and Times of Scrooge (2014), an orchestral album based entirely on Don Rosa's Scrooge McDuck comics. It is the work that best reveals his method: taking someone else's narrative work and turning it into concert music.