Tobias Sammet was born on November 21, 1977, in Fulda, West Germany. He became Edguy’s singer and principal songwriter, then created Avantasia as a way to bring other vocalists into his musical storytelling. Those two outlets gave him different ways to work: the band he formed with schoolmates and a project built around an expanding cast of voices.
Edguy began in February 1992 with Sammet and three fellow students from Fulda. They started with cover songs, recorded demos of their own material in 1994 and paid for the recording of Savage Poetry in 1995. That investment helped them secure a record deal. Sammet also handled bass on the early recordings, including 1998’s Vain Glory Opera, before Tobias Exxel took over the instrument.
On Vain Glory Opera, Hansi Kürsch joined the title track as a guest singer. Bringing another voice into the music would become a much bigger part of Sammet’s writing. In a 2013 interview with Rock Overdose, he traced Avantasia’s beginnings to an idea on a tour bus in 1999: a fantasy story performed by musicians who had inspired him. He wanted characters, a setting and multiple singers who could make that world feel complete.
“I wanted to create my ultimate dream album,” he said. The plan became two records: The Metal Opera, released in 2001, and The Metal Opera Part II, released in 2002. On the first album, Sammet wrote the songs and sang the character Gabriel, with Michael Kiske among the guest vocalists. The different singers were part of the storytelling itself, taking on roles within the same narrative. Once those records were finished, Sammet concentrated on Edguy again. He told Rock Overdose that he initially felt he’d completed what he wanted to say with Avantasia. The desire to write that way returned, however, and he reconsidered leaving the project behind. Its appeal was personal: it offered a place for musical ideas he wanted to pursue.
For Moonglow, released in 2019, that independence extended to the recording process. Speaking to The Metal Crypt in 2018, Sammet explained that he had built a home studio after the tour supporting Ghostlights. He began working without a contract or deadline, and the equipment he collected kept pulling him back toward music. What was supposed to be a break produced enough ideas for another album; a record deal followed once it was underway. Sammet wrote Moonglow’s original material and co-produced the album with Sascha Paeth. Its fantasy setting also gave him some distance from personal experiences. He told The Metal Crypt that the central character’s difficulty finding a place in the world drew on his own feelings of being different while growing up. He approached the lyrics as individual poems belonging to a shared concept, allowing each song to develop its own perspective.
The cast followed the needs of those songs. For “The Raven Child,” Sammet wanted a male voice that could give quieter passages a folk storyteller’s character, and he approached Kürsch. Kürsch and Jørn Lande both guested on the finished recording, bringing a collaborator from Edguy’s Vain Glory Opera into an Avantasia song more than eleven minutes long.
