Rhapsody of Fire

Rhapsody of Fire are an Italian symphonic power metal band from Trieste, formed in 1993 by guitarist Luca Turilli and keyboardist Alex Staropoli, initially alongside drummer Daniele Carbonera and under the name Thundercross. Turilli and Staropoli — who had met a few years earlier — shared an ambition to fuse classical composition with heavy metal rather than merely decorate metal songs with keyboards, and that ambition defined everything the band did afterwards. After a pair of demos, including 1995's Eternal Glory, the group attracted the German label Limb Music, adopted the name Rhapsody, and recruited vocalist Fabio Lione, previously of Athena and Labyrinth, whose operatic tenor became one of the band's signatures. Their debut, Legendary Tales (1997), and its successor Symphony of Enchanted Lands (1998) established a template built on real orchestral arrangements, choirs, neoclassical guitar and keyboard duels, medieval and folk textures, and a continuous fantasy narrative running from album to album. The resulting cinematic style was described as "Hollywood metal" or "film score metal", a term that captured the deliberate ambition to write metal that sounded like a fantasy film soundtrack. The overarching story, the Emerald Sword Saga, unfolded across their first five records: Legendary Tales, Symphony of Enchanted Lands, Dawn of Victory (2000), Rain of a Thousand Flames (2001) and Power of the Dragonflame (2002). "Emerald Sword" itself became the band's best-known song and a genre standard. A second story cycle, the Dark Secret Saga, followed with Symphony of Enchanted Lands II: The Dark Secret (2004), Triumph or Agony (2006), The Frozen Tears of Angels (2010) and From Chaos to Eternity (2011). Its most striking feature was the participation of actor Christopher Lee, who narrated portions of the storyline on Symphony of Enchanted Lands II and returned for Triumph or Agony and The Frozen Tears of Angels; he also lent his singing voice to a version of the single "The Magic of the Wizard's Dream". In July 2006 the band announced that copyright and trademark issues obliged them to change their name from Rhapsody to Rhapsody of Fire. Around the same period they were entangled in protracted legal conflict — Turilli publicly referred in 2008 to a "hard legal fight" with Magic Circle Music, the label run by Manowar's Joey DeMaio — which stalled the group's activity for roughly a year and a half. On 16 August 2011, shortly after From Chaos to Eternity, the band announced the amicable departure of Turilli together with bassist Patrice Guers. The result was two parallel Rhapsody bands: Staropoli and Lione continued as Rhapsody of Fire, while Turilli, Guers and guitarist Dominique Leurquin launched Luca Turilli's Rhapsody, releasing Ascending to Infinity (2012) and Prometheus: Symphonia Ignis Divinus (2015) and describing their sound as "cinematic metal". Rhapsody of Fire pressed on with Dark Wings of Steel (2013) and Into the Legend (2016). Lione left Rhapsody of Fire in September 2016; in November the band introduced Giacomo Voli, a Teodasia frontman and former finalist on The Voice of Italy, as his replacement. Meanwhile Turilli and Lione reunited for the 20th Anniversary Farewell Tour, billed simply as Rhapsody, which ran from 26 April 2017 in Annecy, France to 20 March 2018 in Madrid and performed the classic-era material with Leurquin, Guers and drummer Alex Holzwarth. Staropoli did not take part. That touring lineup subsequently became Turilli/Lione Rhapsody. Rhapsody of Fire, led by Staropoli with Voli on vocals, has continued the Nephilim's Empire Saga across The Eighth Mountain (2019), Glory for Salvation (2021) and Challenge the Wind (2024). Three decades on, the band is broadly acknowledged as one of the founding acts of symphonic power metal, having supplied much of the orchestral-and-choir vocabulary that shaped the genre worldwide.