Within Temptation, featuring Tarja Turunen: “Paradise (What About Us)”

(Analysis by Elizabeth Zharoff)

(I’m doing something a bit different with this post.  Rather than give my own analysis of this song, I’m giving you the analysis of a real expert, a professional singer who just posted her own take on it.  The original video is one of the more remarkable things I’ve seen on youtube--I encourage you to watch both the analysis and the original.

Within Temptation are a Dutch symphonic rock band founded in 1996 by Sharon den Adel and Robert Westerholt.  They were not the first group to merge classical compositional elements with electric rock instruments.  That honour belongs to Therion, founded in 1987 and heavily influenced by the German composer Carl Orff, who died in 1982.  Within Temptation were one of two breakout bands that perfected the concept and brought it to a wide, international audience.

The other breakout symphonic rock band were the Finnish group Nightwish, also founded in 1996, by composer Tuomas Holopainen.  Nightwish started off intending to focus on folk-rock, but soon migrated over to operatic rock, after recruiting Tarja Turunen as their lead vocalist and then realizing her voice was simply too big for their original format. Turunen had trained in opera at the Sibelius Academy and was headed for a career in classical singing when she joined Nightwish.

Both bands have talented composers with classical backgrounds, and top-notch rock instrumentalists, but their singular distinction is their powerful female lead vocalists.  The contrast between the pure, sometimes angelic timbre of their voices and the over-driven electric guitars and heavy instrumentation, is sometimes referred to as “beauty and the beast”.  They don’t do many three-minute radio-ready songs, but specialize in longer epics that often justify the term “rock opera” or “symphonic rock”.  They are best approached the way one would approach sitting down to listen to a movie score.

This song is a collaboration between Within Temptation and Turunen, who left Nightwish in 2005.  The song’s message, as Ms. Zharoff points out, is compelling and pretty relevant to our world. The contrast between den Adel’s pure, bright soprano and Turunen’s darker, more mezzo timbre, is downright shiver-inducing.

Elizabeth Zharoff is a professional, classically trained opera singer who now has a successful youtube channel, where she analyses vocal performances.  In the early days of her channel, she focused on what she knew, which was classical, jazz and popular music.  Then she was introduced to heavy metal, and has gone all in, becoming an expert on metal vocalists, as well as on the deep connections between metal and classical music.  From her website bio:

“We're a community of people who love good music and great singing. Our videos strive to dive deeper into the artists you adore so that we can better understand what makes them so good. Our founder and vocal guru, Elizabeth Zharoff, has degrees in music and voice from the Curtis Institute of Music, Oberlin Conservatory, and Berklee College of Music. She's also a voice science nerd.  Mrs. Zharoff has performed in 18 languages, at major venues in Europe, Asia, and North America.”

After that, you should watch the original video straight through.  Here it is:

Post-Script:  Toward the end of her analysis, Ms. Zharoff makes note of the love and support these artists have for each other.  This is typical of the community of symphonic metal vocalists and the bands in general. They often collaborate with each other and make guest appearances in each other’s concerts.  It is a striking contrast with the jealous, toxic relationship most major American pop stars seem to have with each other, and the even more toxic relations between their fanbases. In fact, many of those pop stars even seem to hate and fear their fans.  Why that is, is a mystery to me.