When Queen’s Freddie Mercury Performed with Opera Superstar Montserrat Caballé in 1988: A Meeting of Two Powerful Voices

Combining pop music with opera was always the height of pretension. But where would we be without the pretentious? As Brian Eno observed in his 1995 diary, “My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.” And with Freddie Mercury and Queen, if it wasn&rs