By Javier Otazu |
New York (EFE)
The song was also going to include unrelated words like “matador” or “belladona”, which were eventually dropped from the final version in favor of “fandango”, “galileo” or “scaramouche” that appear incoherently in the middle of the song.
These little secrets of the composer have become known thanks to the fact that the Sotheby’s house has shown this Thursday in New York a selection of twenty objects that happen to be the most iconic of the singer and leader of Queen, part of a collection of a thousand pieces that It will go up for auction in London on September 6.
Among all of them, the compositions of his own handwriting of some of his most popular songs stand out: “We are the Champions”, “Somebody to love”, “Don’t stop me now” or “Bohemian Rhapsody”, those that “for many of us they were simply always in our lives”, as Sotheby’s points out in a presentation brochure.
Written in the pad of an airline
It is striking that all these manuscripts are on the letterhead of Britisth Midlands, a now defunct airline, and they are written in a disorderly manner, sometimes on top of letters or calendars printed on the sheets.
“He was the type of person who grabbed the first thing that came to hand when an idea came to him,” says Cassandra Hatton, vice president of Sotheby’s, to EFE, but warns about the supposed “disorder” that these sheets can translate into a misleading idea.
He gives as an example that “Bohemian Rhapsody” consists of 15 pages where Mercury wrote – and sometimes scratched out and corrected meticulously – the different vocal and musical parts of a piece of almost six minutes that travels from opera to rock with an audacity awarded with success .
Or that when writing “We are the champions”, Mercury already predicted that the piece could acquire the character of a hymn and thought about how the public would repeat rhythms and words of the song, while in “Somebody to Love” the notes appear written with different colors to clearly mark the different harmonies.
Of all the manuscripts, it is the 15 sheets of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that will go up for auction with a higher price, between one million and one and a half million dollars as a starting price.
A silver mustache comb
The appetizer of the enormous collection of Mercury’s personal objects not only consists of his handwritten pages, but also includes some of the objects most associated with the image of the exuberant artist: the crown that he donned in his famous concert at Wembley Stadium and the high-top Adidas sneakers that still bear the stains from the last time she wore them to the Live Aid concert in 1985.
A black and red leather jacket, aviator glasses, the silver snake-shaped bracelet, and the most curious of all: a silver mini-comb barely 2 centimeters designed to trim the mustache (with a starting price of 900 dollars). ).
Although they do not appear in the selection exhibited in New York, the “Freddie Mercury: A world of his own” collection will include clothes by the singer -often partly designed by him-, accessories of all kinds, books and paintings or objects acquired in Japan , a country whose culture Mercury particularly admired, Hatton recalled.
All the pieces that will go up for auction are part of the singer’s personal collection at his London home of Garden Lodge, in the exclusive neighborhood of Kensington, a Georgian-style house with 28 rooms famous for its legendary parties and which was his last resting place.
The entire collection of Mercruy was preserved since his death in 1991 and carefully cataloged by his great friend Mary Austin, who Mercury said was his only friend. “For me, it was a marriage,” the singer even said.
Sotheby’s is going to extract oil from Mercury’s collection and, after the New York toll, the select collection will travel to Los Angeles and Hong Kong. But only Londoners will be able to see the entire lot in the days leading up to the final sale.