Opus

The stadium in Oberwart, in southern Burgenland, filled up on the second of September 1984 with some five thousand people who had come to celebrate the eleventh anniversary of an Austrian band. Opus played a new song called "Live Is Life" that night, for the first time in their lives. Everything was being recorded, because that concert was meant to produce the group's first live album. And nothing was left of it: the tape was already full.

So they played it again as an encore, twenty minutes later, and that second take is the one that got recorded and the one that went around the world. What you hear there is not an audience that has known the chorus for years: it is an audience that had just learned it that very night, from a single listen. The guitarist Ewald Pfleger says that second time is the greatest moment of his career.

Stegersbach, a basement and a Latin dictionary

And it did not begin in Graz, even if that is the city they are associated with. Opus formed in 1973 in Stegersbach, in southern Burgenland, in the basement of the house belonging to the parents of Walter "Walt" Bachkönig, who had come out of singing in the Vienna Boys' Choir and who had built himself a drum kit out of empty glue tins from the village shirt factory. The four founders were Ewald "Sunny" Pfleger on guitar and vocals, Kurt René Plisnier on keyboards, Bachkönig on bass and Peter "Stevie" Stipsits on drums. The name was found by Bachkönig's sister, Edith, while doing her Latin homework: the word "opus" was in the Stowasser, the Austrian school dictionary.

Stipsits left in 1974 and Günter Grasmuck came in on drums and percussion, staying until the last day. In the taverns and in the basement of the Castell in Stegersbach they played Deep Purple, Colosseum and rocked-up classics: they did Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee". At the end of 1978 the whole band moved to Graz, and shortly afterwards the name most people associate with the founding appeared: Herwig Rüdisser arrived on vocals, answering a newspaper advertisement. He is not a founder, though it is told that way everywhere; he joined in 1978, five years after the basement.

The first album, Daydreams, came out in 1980 and did not chart. The breakthrough came with Eleven, in March 1982: number six in Austria and twenty-four weeks on the chart, which is still their best placing for a studio record. Out of it came "Flyin' High", their first radio hit, number five on the Ö3 Austria Top 40 in August of that year. Then came Opusition, in January 1983, and Up and Down, in May 1984. They had been going eleven years and had four studio albums behind them when they walked onto the stage in Oberwart.

One man wrote it, on Ibiza

The single is credited to five: Pfleger, Plisnier, Grasmuck, the bassist Niki Gruber and Rüdisser. But the song was written by Pfleger alone, on holiday on Ibiza, trying to capture the feeling of being onstage in front of an audience. The five of them agreed from the start to split the rights and royalties in equal shares, and Pfleger defends it in public with an argument that is almost a moral one: that way five families still live off that one worldwide hit. He says he is not a millionaire, that he lives very well off the song and that his son probably will too, because the rights run for seventy years.

The other detail about the title is phonetic. Half of humanity believes the song is called "Life Is Life", and there is a reason for that: in German, final consonants are devoiced, so in an Austrian mouth "live" sounds exactly like "life". The mistake is documented even in the literature on one-hit wonders. And the hit has not budged: in 2025 the song was adding up some seven hundred radio plays a day and more than two hundred and seventy million streams on Spotify.

The gold was not in the United States

The live album Live Is Life came out in December 1984 and was number one in Austria, with thirty-four weeks on the chart. The single took a few more months to leave the country, and when it did it was number one in Austria, West Germany, France, Sweden, Spain and the Canadian retail chart of The Record; number two in Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Flanders and South Africa; number three in the Netherlands; number four in Ireland; and number six in the United Kingdom, where it peaked on the third of August 1985. In Germany it was the best-selling single of the year, and the number one of the year in Switzerland too.

In the United States, on the other hand, what usually gets told did not happen. The single was released there in January 1986 and stalled at number thirty-two on the Billboard Hot 100, with sixteen weeks on the chart, and at number thirty-five on Cash Box; Up and Down, whose North American edition included "Live Is Life" because the live album was not distributed in the country, reached number sixty-four on the Billboard 200. There is no American certification at all: the gold record sometimes attributed to it in the United States does not appear in the registers. Gold there was, but in France, Germany and Spain; in the United Kingdom it was silver, not gold, and the Italian gold was certified only in 2021, thirty-six years late.

The real American blow was Canada. Number one on the retail chart of The Record, double platinum from Music Canada in 1986 and, on the tenth of November of that year, the Juno Award for international single of the year, handed over at the Harbour Castle Hilton in Toronto. An award from the Canadian industry for an Austrian single recorded in a stadium in Burgenland.

Falco came up to play the bass

On the twenty-ninth of June 1985, with the song already number one across half of Europe, Opus put on a benefit concert for Africa at the Graz-Liebenau stadium in front of more than twenty-five thousand people, with S.T.S., the EAV, Wolfgang Ambros, Maria Bill, Wilfried and Falco. Falco had turned down another African project and accepted this one because the two bands knew and valued each other, and when he came up he did not confine himself to singing: he traded verses with Rüdisser on "Flyin' High" and played electric bass, in trainers, jogging trousers and a sleeveless black leather jacket. The debt was mutual, because Opus had sung the backing vocals on "Junge Roemer" the year before. He came up with them again on the seventeenth of September 1993, at the Orpheum in Graz, for the band's twentieth anniversary; that time he only sang.

The size of what happened in 1985 is better measured in the collateral damage. In Germany there had been another band called Opus since 1980; when the Austrian single became the best-selling record of the year in the country, the Germans had to rename themselves and reissue their LP with a different sleeve. They called themselves Pur and were one of the most popular groups in Germany over the following two decades. Two years later the Slovenian collective Laibach recorded two readings of the song for their album Opus Dei, one in English and one in German, both dark and martial, and together with their version of "One Vision" by Queen they were what gave them their first mass exposure on MTV. An anthem of celebration turned into a parody of totalitarian aesthetics.

Munich, the warm-up and a false memory

On Wednesday the nineteenth of April 1989, at the Olympiastadion in Munich, Bayern and Napoli drew two-all in the second leg of the UEFA Cup semi-final in front of more than seventy-three thousand spectators. Diego Maradona started wearing the number ten and Napoli went through four-two on aggregate. Before the match, during the warm-up, Maradona did keepy-uppies to the rhythm of "Live Is Life", and out of that came the video everyone has seen.

Two things about that warm-up are told wrong. The first is how the song was playing, and the sources disagree: Wikipedia and the Huffington Post say it was coming out of the stadium loudspeakers, and ESPN maintains that it was not a DJ playing it but a covers band performing it live, stringing together hits from the early eighties. There is no way to settle it. The second is that the video barely exists: that day the cameras were filming for the scoreboard screen and nothing was being broadcast. It was the Belgian producer Frank Raes who understood what he had seen, got in touch with ZDF and obtained twelve minutes of warm-up footage, out of which he cut the clip that has been circulating ever since.

And there is a false memory worth its weight in gold. Jürgen Klinsmann has told it in the first person, as having been there: that there were seventy thousand people, that they were warming up at the other end of the pitch, very focused, like Germans, that "Live Is Life" was playing, that Maradona started doing keepy-uppies to the rhythm of the song and that they stopped warming up because they could do nothing but watch him. He places it in the final, in Stuttgart. Klinsmann was not in Munich: in 1989 he was playing for VfB Stuttgart, who met Napoli in the final, not in the semi-final. He did play against Maradona's Napoli and scored a goal against them in the second leg, but he saw the warm-up the way everybody else did, on video.

What to remember

Opus lasted forty-eight years, twelve studio albums and sixteen counting the live ones. In October 1987 they put out an album recorded in part with Eddy Offord, the former producer of Yes, and out of it came "Whiteland", whose earnings went to Greenpeace. There were honours from the Austrian state in 2009 and in 2022 and an Amadeus for lifetime achievement in 2021. And there was an ugly episode: in January 2020, when Heinz-Christian Strache played the song at the event where he announced his candidacy in Vienna, Pfleger issued a statement saying that Opus distanced itself in the most emphatic terms, that nobody had asked them for permission and that his lawyer would examine whether they could take legal action. There is no record that they ever brought any.

The ending had a date and it was a dignified one. On the twenty-first of December 2021, at the Graz Opera, sold out, Opus played for three hours and some thirty songs, at least one from each of their sixteen albums, and donated the thirty-one thousand euros of the takings to the building of a school in Ethiopia. Rüdisser introduced the closing number by asking the audience to enjoy it, because it was the last time they were going to hear it that way. The four of the core — Pfleger, Plisnier, Grasmuck and Rüdisser — are alive. The one who did not make it that far is Wolfram Abt, the bassist who recorded and played with them from 1990 and for eighteen years: he died on the eighth of February 2008 and, according to his obituary in the Austrian Musikergilde, he took his own life. He had been born in 1969. No source gives a reason, and there is no need to invent one for him.

When that chorus comes up in a stadium and sounds as if it were being sung by a crowd that has known it all its life, there is the fact that explains it: it was five thousand people in a stadium in Burgenland who had heard the song exactly once, twenty minutes earlier, and they were singing it as an encore because the tape was full. And if you or someone you know is going through a crisis or having suicidal thoughts, in Chile you can call *4141 free of charge, the Minsal suicide prevention line, available twenty-four hours a day.

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Sources

Opus is an Austrian rock band formed in 1973 in Stegersbach, southern Burgenland, in the basement of the house of Walter Bachkönig's parents; the German Wikipedia infobox records Judendorf-Straßengel (Styria) as the formal place of origin, and the English Wikipedia and the press usually give Graz, the city the band moved to as a whole at the end of 1978. The name was taken by Edith Bachkönig from the Stowasser, the Austrian school Latin dictionary. Founders in 1973: Ewald "Sunny" Pfleger (guitar and vocals, 1973-2021), Kurt René Plisnier (keyboards, 1973-2021), Walter "Walt" Bachkönig (bass, 1973-1980, trained in the Vienna Boys' Choir) and Peter "Stevie" Stipsits (drums, 1973-1974). Later additions: Günter Grasmuck (drums and percussion, 1974-2021), Hans Pallier (guitar, 1974-1980), Herwig Rüdisser (lead vocals, 1978-2021; real name Herwig Tremschnig, born in Klagenfurt; the official website gives 1979 as his year of joining), Niki Gruber (Peter Niklas Gruber, bass, 1980-1991), Günter Timischl (vocals and percussion, 1983-1985) and Wolfram Abt (studio and live bass, 1990-2008). Pfleger and Plisnier are the only two present from 1973 to 2021. Twelve studio albums between 1980 and 2020, from "Daydreams" to "Magnum", and sixteen in total including the live ones, the figure used by the band and by the ORF; Rüdisser's biography on the German Wikipedia says thirteen studio albums. "Daydreams" (1980, producer Peter Janda) did not chart; "Eleven" (March 1982) was no. 6 in Austria with 24 weeks; "Flyin' High" (August 1982) no. 5 on the Ö3 Austria Top 40 with 12 weeks and no. 45 in West Germany; "Opusition" (January 1983) no. 16 in Austria; "Angie" (autumn 1983) no. 18; in 1983 they played 65 concerts in front of more than 100,000 spectators; "Up and Down" (May 1984, OK Musica / Polydor, producer Peter Müller) no. 12 in Austria, no. 64 on the Billboard 200 with 16 weeks and no. 51 in Canada (RPM). Recording of "Live Is Life": Sunday 2 September 1984, Oberwart stadium (Burgenland), concert for the band's 11th anniversary in front of some 5,000 people according to Pfleger; the first performance of the song was not recorded because the tape was full, and the released take is the encore, played some twenty minutes later. Pfleger dates the take to 4 September in one interview; the official website, the ORF, the Kleine Zeitung and both Wikipedias give the 2nd. Single "Live Is Life" (1984, Polydor / OK, producer Peter Müller, 4:14), credited to Ewald Pfleger, Kurt René Plisnier, Günter Grasmuck, Niki Gruber and Herwig Rüdisser; composed by Pfleger alone, on holiday on Ibiza, with rights and royalties split in equal shares between the five. Live album "Live Is Life" (December 1984): no. 1 in Austria with 34 weeks, no. 5 in Germany with 24 and no. 4 in Switzerland with 28. Chart placings of the single: no. 1 in Austria (8 weeks at the top, 25 on the chart), France (7 weeks), West Germany (27 weeks on the chart), Sweden (4 weeks), Spain (AFYVE) and the Canadian retail chart of "The Record"; no. 2 in Flanders, Finland, Switzerland (21 weeks), Norway and South Africa; no. 3 in the Netherlands; no. 4 in Ireland; no. 6 in the United Kingdom with 16 weeks, peaking on 3 August 1985; no. 7 in Canada (RPM); no. 32 on the Billboard Hot 100 with 16 weeks, after the American release of January 1986; no. 35 on the Cash Box Top 100 in the week of 29 March 1986. It was the no. 1 of the year 1985 in Switzerland and in West Germany — where it was the best-selling single of the year — and no. 4 of the year in Austria. Certifications: Canada 2× platinum (Music Canada, 1986); France gold for 500,000 units (1986, recorded in "European Gold & Platinum Awards 1986", Music & Media, 27 December 1986, p. 33); Germany gold (1985); Spain gold for the single (1985) and for the album (1986); Italy gold (FIMI, certified in 2021); United Kingdom silver (BPI, 1985), not gold. No RIAA certification is on record: the "gold record in the USA" claimed by the German Wikipedia and by 20 Minuten does not appear in the certifications table and could not be confirmed in the RIAA database. Other milestones of 1985: "Warum?", by Austria für Afrika with Opus among the participants, no. 1 in Austria on 15 April; "Flyin' High (Live)", 3 May, no. 5 in Switzerland and no. 37 in Germany; benefit concert for Africa at the Graz-Liebenau stadium on Saturday 29 June in front of more than 25,000 people, with S.T.S., the EAV, the Kurt Gober Band, Wolfgang Ambros, Falco, Maria Bill and Wilfried, released in 2013 as "Opus & Friends – Graz Liebenau 1985" (no. 18 in Austria); and the album "Solo", September, no. 8 in Austria. At that concert Falco traded verses with Rüdisser on "Flyin' High" and played electric bass; he came up with the band again on 17 September 1993 at the Orpheum in Graz, for the 20th anniversary, that time only as a singer. Opus had sung the backing vocals on Falco's "Junge Roemer" in 1984. Falco died in 1998. Juno Award for International Single of the Year on 10 November 1986, at the Harbour Castle Hilton in Toronto. "Opus" (October 1987) no. 7 in Austria, recorded in part with Eddy Offord, former producer of Yes; the single "Whiteland" (18 October 1987) was no. 3 in Austria and its earnings went to Greenpeace. Afterwards: "Faster and Faster" (1988) no. 12; "Magical Touch" (March 1990, producer Erwin Musper) no. 26, the last with Niki Gruber; "Walkin' on Air" (May 1992) no. 13; "The Power of Live Is Life" (1994, remixes by the Bingoboys) no. 3 in Austria and no. 7 in Iceland; "Love God & Radio" (1996) and "The Beat Goes On" (2004) did not chart; "Live Is Life '08" (9 May 2008, with Jerry) no. 16 in Austria, marketed by Sony BMG for Euro 2008; and "Magnum" (13 November 2020) no. 37. The German band Pur was called Opus between 1980 and 1985 and had to rename itself and reissue its LP "Vorsicht Zerbrechlich" with a different sleeve when the Austrian single became the best-selling record of the year in Germany. Cover versions: Laibach recorded "Opus Dei" (in English) and "Leben heißt Leben" (in German) for their album "Opus Dei" (Mute Records, 23 April 1987), which together with their cover of Queen's "One Vision" gave the Slovenian collective its first mass exposure on MTV and on "The Chart Show"; Stargo (1985) reached no. 10 in France in the same year as the original; Hermes House Band with DJ Ötzi released "Live Is Life (Here We Go)" on 24 June 2002 (Universal / Polydor), no. 2 in France for five weeks, French platinum with 537,000 units as of August 2014 and the 23rd best-selling single of the 21st century in France. The song was interpolated in "Love Is the Name" by Sofia Carson (2016), adapted by Liverpool supporters as a chant for Jürgen Klopp in January 2016 and re-recorded as the official song of the 2024 Women's European Handball Championship. The mistake of calling it "Life Is Life" is explained by the devoicing of final obstruents in German and is documented in Tom Bromley, "We Could Have Been the Wombles" (Penguin, 2006), p. 223. Maradona's warm-up: Wednesday 19 April 1989, Olympiastadion in Munich, second leg of the 1988-89 UEFA Cup semi-final, Bayern Munich 2-2 SSC Napoli, 73,132 spectators, referee David Syme (Scotland), goals by Careca 61' and 76', Roland Wohlfarth 63' and Stefan Reuter 81', with Maradona starting and wearing the number 10 shirt; Napoli went through 4-2 on aggregate after winning 2-0 in Naples on 5 April. The sources disagree about how the music was played: Wikipedia and the Huffington Post UK (17 April 2014) say it was coming out of the stadium loudspeakers; ESPN (22 April 2020) maintains that it was not a DJ playing it but a covers band of the stadium playing it live. That day the cameras were recording only for the scoreboard screen and nothing was broadcast: the Belgian producer Frank Raes arranged with ZDF for the 12 minutes of warm-up footage out of which the clip that has circulated ever since was cut, which by 2013 had almost two million views on YouTube. In 1989 Jürgen Klinsmann was playing for VfB Stuttgart, who met Napoli in the UEFA Cup final — 3 May 1989, San Paolo, Napoli 2-1 Stuttgart, with a Maradona penalty at 68', a Careca goal at 87' and one by Gaudino at 17', 81,093 spectators; and 17 May 1989, Neckarstadion, Stuttgart 3-3 Napoli, with goals by Klinsmann at 27', a De Napoli own goal at 70' and Schmäler at 89' against Alemão at 18', Ferrara at 39' and Careca at 62', 67,000 spectators; Napoli champions 5-4 on aggregate, their first European title — not in the Munich semi-final. His first-person account of the warm-up, recorded by Mike Woitalla in Soccer America on 25 September 2013, places it in the final and in Stuttgart: it is a documented false memory. Maradona died on 25 November 2020. Political use: on Thursday 23 January 2020, at the Neujahrstreffen of the DAÖ (Die Allianz für Österreich) held at the Sofiensäle in Vienna, where Heinz-Christian Strache announced his candidacy for the Vienna elections, "Live Is Life" was played; the following day Ewald Pfleger issued a statement in which Opus distanced itself "in the most emphatic terms", asserted that their consent had not been sought and announced that his lawyer would examine whether they could take legal action. There is no record that the suit was filed, nor of any ruling or settlement. Honours: Großes Ehrenzeichen des Landes Steiermark to Grasmuck, Pfleger, Plisnier and Rüdisser in September 2009; concert with orchestra at the Graz Opera conducted by Christian Kolonovits, released as "Tonight At The Opera"; Amadeus Award for Lebenswerk on 1 September 2021; and Goldenes Ehrenzeichen für Verdienste um die Republik Österreich in June 2022. Farewell: Tuesday 21 December 2021, Graz Opera, sold out, some 3 hours and around 30 songs, at least one from each of the 16 albums, with Maria Bill, Willi Resetarits, Reinhold Bilgeri, Gert Steinbäcker, Johannes Silberschneider, the Schick Sisters and Robby Musenbichler as guests; it was a benefit concert and raised 31,000 euros for "Menschen für Menschen", earmarked for the building of a school in Ethiopia; ORF 2 broadcast it on 26 March 2022. The English Wikipedia wrongly gives 24 November 2021 as the last performance. The live album from that night, "The Last Note" (2022), was no. 6 in Austria; "We Are One" (21 September 2023), with the Schick Sisters, is a collaboration subsequent to the break-up and not an Opus reunion. No member of Opus has died: there is no obituary for Pfleger, Plisnier, Grasmuck, Rüdisser, Bachkönig, Stipsits, Pallier or Niki Gruber. Wolfram Abt (1969 – 8 February 2008), Opus's studio and live bassist from 1990, who graduated in electric bass from the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz in 1995, also a musician with S.T.S. from 1996 and a teacher at the University of Arts in Graz from March 2004, died by suicide according to his obituary in the Austrian Musikergilde, which words it as "freiwillig aus dem Leben geschieden"; there is no public forensic report and no source states a reason. There is no record of addictions, criminal cases, accusations or internal lawsuits in the band, and there is no suit, ruling, settlement or dispute over the authorship or ownership of "Live Is Life". Figures for 2025: some 700 radio plays a day and more than 270 million streams on Spotify. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from the German and English Wikipedias (Opus, "Live Is Life", "Opus Dei", the 1986 Juno Awards, Pur and the 1989 UEFA Cup final), the official site opus.at, the interview with Ewald Pfleger on athenscalling.gr, the Styrian ORF (22 December 2021 and 1 September 2021), Bernd Melichar in the Kleine Zeitung (1 August 2014), 20 Minuten (4 April 2025), Salzburg24 and nachrichten.at (24 January 2020), Wolfram Abt's obituary on musikergilde.at, falco-compendium.at, 5min.at, the DFB Datencenter, worldfootball.net, Soccer America (25 September 2013), the Huffington Post UK (17 April 2014), ESPN, austriancharts.at, offiziellecharts.de, hitparade.ch, officialcharts.com, musiccanada.com, Music & Media (27 December 1986) and the Cash Box Top 100 (29 March 1986).