Shock-rocker Ozzy Osbourne opens his live shows with "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's choral masterpiece "Carmina Burana."
Which surprised Trans-Siberian Orchestra founder and composer Paul O'Neill. Not only does "Carmina Burana" land squarely in the classical music bin, but the text is sung in Latin.
"I don't know many teens today who are learning Latin," quipped O'Neill. "That's the power of music, that it doesn't need translation at times."
And oftentimes, music can transcend genres and generations on one stage. That's always been the premise of O'Neill's prog-rock outfit, which has made a career over the past 16 years of putting rock 'n' roll and classical music on one stage, with all the laser light effects of rock and the musicianship of classical.
Next Thursday, O'Neill and company - a rock band, chamber orchestra and nearly two dozen vocalists - return to Tucson for the first time in eight years to perform their 2000 album "Beethoven's Last Night." The rock opera takes a fictional look at the composer's final hours as he bargains with the devil for his music's legacy.
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The tour comes as the band is re-releasing the completely narrated version of the album. The disc, which came out last week, includes 90 missing pages of poetry, illustrations from Greg Hildebrandt ("Lord of the Rings," "Star Wars," DC Comics and Marvel Comics) and cover-to-cover narration by Bryan Hicks.
The story, created by O'Neill, takes place on a stormy spring night in 1827. Beethoven is slumped over his piano having just completed his final work, the 10th Symphony, which he is certain will be his crowning glory. Fate and her deformed son Twist (as in "Twist of Fate") show up to tell the composer his time is up. At the stroke of midnight, Mephistopheles - the devil - appears to collect Beethoven's soul. He makes a deal with him: He can keep his soul in exchange for erasing any memory of Beethoven's music from mankind, thus igniting a back-in-time reflective journey that recalls Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."
Fate and Twist escort Beethoven to key moments of his life to show him that if he changed any of the misfortunes in his life, including his deafness, his music would suffer.
Trans-Siberian Orchestra has been touring "Beethoven's Last Night" since 2010, which initially struck its record label as an odd twist. Why would a rock band renowned for its Christmas-themed rock operas resurrect a 10-year-old album?
"Because in rock 'n' roll, the normal rule is that you focus on the newest album. And since 'Night Castle' came out in 2009, they were like why aren't you doing 'Night Castle' in the first half of the show?" O'Neill explained in a phone interview. "I said TSO doesn't exist in a vacuum. … Even though 'Beethoven's Last Night' is more than a decade old, it just seemed more appropriate."
The show has attracted audiences that cross generations and genres. Fans of classical music sit next to devotees of rock, and O'Neill said each finds something to love.
"Normally teenagers who would never listen to Beethoven and Mozart, but because it's a prog-rock band, they're like 'Oh that's Beethoven? That's Mozart?' And they'll check it out," he said. "And the older folks who are maybe into the classics, so many philharmonics and orchestras treat Beethoven and Mozart like they were fossils. Put them behind glass and look at them. When they perform them they perform them on exactly the same instruments that they used when they were alive.
"But if Beethoven and Mozart were alive today, they would be using electric guitars. They would be using electric keyboards. And they would embrace the new technology."
O'Neill is sure that Beethoven and Mozart would be the world's biggest rock stars if they were products of the 21st century.
"To me, Mozart was the world's first rock star. Mozart lived like a rock star, died at 33 like a rock star and died penniless like a rock star," he said. "And Beethoven was the world's first heavy-metal rock star. Think of the Fifth Symphony - 'Da, da, da, dun!'"
O'Neill said the band will tour "Beethoven's Last Night" through May, hitting big and small cities throughout North America.
Once the group is finished, it will turn its attention to developing rock theater, a concept it has been working on for the past several years. The idea is to capitalize on the group's rock ethos in a setting that borrows from Broadway's storytelling.
"The whole plan since we started in 1996 was to always keep pushing the envelope of what a rock band could do on both the album and in concert," he explained. "Trans-Siberian Orchestra is technically a rock band. It's also an idea and an ideal."
If you go
• What: Trans-Siberian Orchestra "Beethoven's Last Night."
• When: 7:30 p.m., March 29.
• Where: Tucson Arena, 260 S. Church Ave.
• Tickets: $35 to $55 through www.ticketmaster.com