To understand how two worlds this far apart – the guitar and the ribosome, the double bass drum and the DNA – ended up in the same track, you have to start from a biographical detail almost nobody knows. Tuomas Holopainen, the man who has always written Nightwish's music, studied biology before becoming a full-time musician. Then the band's first record, Angels Fall First, took off and tipped another life over onto him. The degree stayed a road not taken. But some passions don't leave: they settle to the bottom and wait. When the time came for the eighth album, in 2015, Holopainen reached back down to that bottom and pulled up an idea: to write a monumental song about the evolution of life. He wanted to title it after a book he loved, The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. But before getting to that song, it helps to understand who Nightwish really were, and why they of all bands could conceive of such an idea.

Nightwish, or how to tell a story with a distorted orchestra

For anyone who doesn't follow the genre, an introduction is in order. Nightwish were born in Finland in 1996 and became, within a few albums, the reference band for a current they helped to define: symphonic metal. The idea, seemingly contradictory, is simple: take the power of metal – distorted guitars, double bass drum, massive sonorities – and make it live alongside the arsenal of classical music: orchestra, choirs, a female voice often of operatic training. The result is not a watered-down compromise but a dramatic, almost cinematic form, built to tell big stories. Nightwish songs are routinely little soundtracks to films that don't exist.

Holopainen, the keyboardist and composer, is its sole mind: he writes music and lyrics and conceives each record as a unified work, to be heard from beginning to end the way you watch a film. This obsession with storytelling explains why, sooner or later, an album about evolution had to come: for an author like this, the history of life on Earth is not a theme, it is the theme, the greatest screenplay available.

Then there is the question of the voice, which in Nightwish has never been a detail. At the origin of it all is Tarja Turunen, an operatic soprano trained at the prestigious Sibelius Academy, who founded the band in 1996 together with Holopainen and guitarist Emppu Vuorinen. Nightwish did not invent the marriage of a female voice and metal out of nothing: they arrived in the wake of a European flowering that, in the mid-Nineties, was redefining the genre – from The Gathering's Mandylion (1995), with the voice of Anneke van Giersbergen, to the Swedes Therion who orchestrated metal with operatic choirs, to their fellow travellers Within Temptation and, later, After Forever and Epica. But it was Nightwish's formula – Tarja's operatic, dramatic, classically schooled voice laid over fast, cutting guitars – that gave symphonic metal its most recognisable incarnation. For nearly a decade Tarja was the face and the voice of the group, through the albums that made them famous across Europe, up to the triumphant Once of 2004. Then, in October 2005, came the most spectacular rupture in the history of the genre: a wound that marked the band for years and that Holopainen would later transfigure into music.

In the years that followed, the voice of Nightwish became a chapter in continuous rewriting. Tarja was succeeded by the Swede Anette Olzon, with a more pop and rock timbre. But that chapter too closed abruptly: when, halfway through the 2012 tour, Olzon left the group suddenly, Holopainen found himself without a voice midway through. The solution came in the most rocambolesque manner: they called the Dutch singer Floor Jansen – already known in metal for After Forever and ReVamp – while she was at her sister's wedding. A few hours later she was on a plane, and with two days' notice she stepped onto the stage in Seattle to sing a repertoire she barely knew. The pressure of that feat is documented in the documentary Please Learn the Setlist in 48 Hours, whose title already says it all.

Jansen did not merely save the tour: she dominated it. The audience adopted her instantly, and in 2013 she became a permanent member. But there was a loose end: live she was already a legend, in the studio with Nightwish she had not yet recorded a note. Endless Forms Most Beautiful, from 2015, is her first studio album with the band, and it is here that “The Greatest Show on Earth” takes on a second meaning, parallel to the scientific one. Floor Jansen possesses one of the most versatile voices in contemporary metal – she moves from operatic soprano to aggressive growl within the span of a single verse – and those final twenty-four minutes are the proving ground on which she displays the entire range. For many listeners, the real “evolution” the record told was also that of the band itself, which after years of vocal turmoil was finally finding its most accomplished form. (A small note for those who know certain territories: Jansen is also at home in the universe of Arjen Lucassen, having sung in Ayreon and Star One – another place where science fiction and science become matter for electric orchestras.)

So here is the band – the composer-narrator obsessed with total storytelling, the voice capable of staggering vocal range – ready for the most ambitious record of its career. Only one thing was missing: convincing a biologist to come aboard. And how Holopainen pulled it off is the best part of the story.

A handwritten letter

Instead of settling for the borrowed title, Holopainen decided to ask Dawkins himself to take part in the record. And the way he asked says everything about the respect at stake. No email, no agents, no press office. Holopainen took pen and paper and wrote by hand, because – he reasoned – a handwritten letter has a better chance of being read. He explained the project, the album about evolution, the track that would carry the title of one of Dawkins's books, and asked whether the professor might like to recite a few passages on the record.

Dawkins, for his part, had not the faintest idea who Nightwish were. He admitted it with disarming candour: he had long forgotten even how to write a letter by hand, he joked, and he had never heard of the band. But his assistant had, told him they were very good, and that was enough. Two weeks later, the reply arrived by email. It was a yes.

Let's pause a moment on the image: on one side a musician who, to chase his own old scientific passion, uses artisanal care to write a letter with the candour of a pupil; on the other a scientist who agrees to step into a territory he completely ignores, trusting the idea. Neither of the two was after a stunt. They were seeking each other out on common ground.

An hour in the studio, thirty fragments

The technical part of the collaboration was surprisingly brief. Dawkins spent a single hour in an English studio recording his contributions. In those sixty minutes some thirty spoken passages were laid down. Holopainen took them home and did the work a composer does: he chose the ones that fitted best with the music, discarded the others – or rather, did not really discard them, because some later ended up in the live performances. But there is a detail that deserves attention: the music had already been written and defined note by note, before Dawkins ever opened his mouth. And Holopainen deliberately chose not to adapt anything to the professor's voice: he wanted that voice as it was, with no made-to-measure seams. Precisely for this reason Dawkins's presence turned out more powerful. Not a guest put at ease, but a real voice left free to merge with the music according to its own nature. It is the same logic with which a naturalist films an animal without taming it.

The man on the other side of the envelope

So far we have followed the story from Nightwish's side. But who was the man who received that letter, and why is his presence no ordinary cameo? Richard Dawkins, born in Nairobi in 1941 and educated at Oxford, where he took his biology degree in 1962 and his doctorate, is one of the most influential living evolutionary biologists. Not for his laboratory discoveries, however, but for something rarer: the ability to rewrite the way we think about evolution and to communicate it to millions of people.

The book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene of 1976, proposed a reversal of perspective. Until then the tendency had been to imagine that natural selection worked for the good of the species or the group. Dawkins shifted the focus onto the gene: the fundamental unit on which evolution acts, he argued, is not the individual nor the species, but the gene itself, which uses organisms – ourselves included – as “survival machines” to perpetuate itself. It is in the same book that Dawkins coined a word we all now use without thinking: meme, the unit of cultural evolution, the idea that replicates and spreads as a gene does. Few in the world have known, as he has, how to distil complex scientific concepts into limpid and impassioned prose, turning biology into a narrative capable of moving us. It is an attitude that to Holopainen must have rung familiar, because it is exactly what Nightwish do with music: take something vast and make it palpable. The Greatest Show on Earth, the 2009 book from which the track takes its title, is at bottom a great act of popularisation – an impassioned gathering of the evidence for evolution.

What the track is really about

What remains is the twenty-four minutes – the place where all this, finally, takes sound. It is the longest song Nightwish have ever written, and the mixing alone of that piece took two and a half weeks. But the length is not ostentation: it is the time needed to tell the story the track sets out to tell, namely everything. Literally everything, from the birth of the planet to a future we do not know.

The track is divided into five chapters, and follows an arc that is at once cosmological and biological. It begins in silence, the same silence of the universe before the Big Bang. Then a few piano chords emerge, scattered, with no apparent melodic logic: the universe before time, before the rules exist. After about a minute and a half, the explosion. And only around the fifth minute does life appear – and it is there that Dawkins's voice comes in, in the role that suits him most naturally: that of the narrator who walks us into natural history.

From there the lyrics become a small poetic compendium of science. There is the Earth forming in the “Goldilocks zone”, the orbital band neither too hot nor too cold where life is possible. There is LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor: that single organism from which, according to the best reconstructions, every living thing on Earth descends, from the bacterium to the whale. There is the long march of chemistry becoming biology, of those “endless forms most beautiful” that give the whole album its title.

And it is here that the literary circle closes, because the story is not only about Dawkins. That phrase, “endless forms most beautiful”, is not Dawkins's: it is Charles Darwin's, and it is the dazzling closing line of On the Origin of Species. The album and the track thus rest on a double root – the nineteenth-century founding father and his most celebrated contemporary interpreter – and Dawkins enters the record not as a provocateur, but as the link connecting Darwin's voice to our ears. A curiosity within the curiosity: Holopainen had thought of titling the whole album The Greatest Show on Earth, then found it too pompous and kept that title only for the closing track, leaving to Darwin's phrase the honour of the cover.

Why this story matters

One could dismiss the episode as an oddity, a curiosity for an encyclopedia of rock, but that would be a mistake. Dawkins has always maintained that science ought to be a source of inspiration for musicians, exactly as love, death or war are. Nightwish proved him right in the most concrete way possible: by taking evolution – the grandest story our species has ever assembled – and treating it for what it is, a story worthy of twenty-four minutes of symphonic music.

Marko Hietala, at the time the band's second voice, called the track “probably the culmination of everything we've done together”. He was right.

Sources and further reading

• Nightwish, Richard Dawkins and Endless Forms Most Beautiful (Prog / Louder Sound, 2015). Primary source for the handwritten-letter story, Holopainen's biology background, Dawkins's “I'd never heard of Nightwish” admission, and the Wembley performance. https://www.loudersound.com/features/nightwish-richard-dawkins-endless-forms-most-beautiful
• VIDEO: Nightwish discuss working with Prof Richard Dawkins (Metal Hammer / Louder Sound, 2015). Holopainen and Floor Jansen on the handwritten letter and on Darwin and Carl Sagan as further inspirations. https://www.loudersound.com/features/video-nightwish-discuss-working-with-prof-richard-dawkins
• Behind the scenes with Nightwish at Wembley Arena (Louder Sound, 2016). On Dawkins's first-ever rock concert appearance at Wembley. https://www.loudersound.com/features/behind-the-scenes-with-nightwish-at-wembley-arena
• Endless Forms Most Beautiful (album) (Wikipedia). Background on the 2015 album, its Darwinian and Dawkinsian inspiration, and Dawkins's spoken-word contribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endless_Forms_Most_Beautiful_(album)
• Richard Dawkins (Wikipedia). Biography: Nairobi 1941, Oxford, Niko Tinbergen, The Selfish Gene (1976), the coining of “meme”, The Greatest Show on Earth (2009). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins
• Tarja Turunen (Wikipedia). Founding of Nightwish in 1996, the Sibelius Academy training, the October 2005 dismissal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarja_Turunen
• Mandylion (Wikipedia). The Gathering's 1995 album with Anneke van Giersbergen, a foundational record of the female-fronted European scene. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandylion_(album)
• Please Learn the Setlist in 48 Hours – documentary on Floor Jansen's emergency debut with Nightwish in 2012. http://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=vhExkmWKMEU

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