It’s one of rock’s best-known and strangest songs: a six-minute radio hit that starts out as a piano ballad, becomes a high-pitched opera, and then tumbles into a headbanger’s anthem. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, released in 1975, sold millions of copies, topped the charts and helped redefine what pop music could be.

But the track’s history could have been very different — in one aspect, at least.

An early draft of the song by Freddie Mercury, Queen’s frontman, suggests that he once considered giving the anthem a different title: Mongolian Rhapsody.

The draft is among thousands of Mercury’s belongings that are being auctioned in September by Sotheby’s on behalf of his friend and heir Mary Austin, who told the BBC that she had decided to sell the collection because she needed to put her “affairs in order”. The collection, which had been kept in Mercury’s London home since his death in 1991 of bronchopneumonia resulting from AIDS, includes stage costumes and furniture as well as the 15 pages of early drafts for Bohemian Rhapsody. On one page, Mercury wrote the words Mongolian Rhapsody near the top. He then crossed out that first word and added Bohemian above it.

The page will go on public view in an exhibition at Sotheby’s New York on Thursday till June 8.

New York Times News Service