NIGHTWISH keyboardist and chief songwriter Tuomas Holopainen has ruled out any possibility of a reunion with original vocalist Tarja Turunen, telling the UK's Metal Hammer that a twenty-one-year-old rift is not something either side wants to reopen.
Turunen was dismissed from NIGHTWISH at the close of the band's 2005 tour, handed an open letter that the group simultaneously published on its own website. "To you, unfortunately, business, money, and things that have nothing to do with emotions have become much more important," her bandmates wrote — a sentence that has followed them ever since.
Holopainen does not dispute that the manner of it was indefensible. NIGHTWISH "get blamed for what happened, for good reason," he conceded, while insisting the decision itself was unavoidable: "We were just operating in survival mode and plagued by these dark thoughts." There was, he said, no future for the band with Turunen in it.
The fallout ran both ways. The remaining members "got completely butchered in the media," Holopainen recalled. "It was like we were these evil neanderthals who'd hurt our wonderful ex-singer. I got some really interesting letters, let's put it that way."
Asked whether time had softened anything, he was blunt. "It was a divorce, and an ugly one at that, so I think we have our own lives now." The commercial case for a reunion has been put to him directly, and he dismissed it just as quickly. "Someone did say to me if we got Tarja and Marko [Hietala, the bassist/vocalist who left in 2020] back in, we could tour just South America for a year straight. That's not gonna happen."
Turunen gave her own account to the same magazine last month, and her version is considerably less reconciled. Her one regret, she said, was restraint: "I probably should have put them through hell. I had all my rights, there were contracts, and they would have been in deep shit for a long time if I had done that." Instead she left. What followed, she said, was "their really great planning, how they wanted to destroy me publicly."
The aftermath drove her out of Finland entirely — her face on the tabloids for three weeks, she said, before she relocated to Buenos Aires. "It affected my family, my friends. Everybody was destroyed. It took me a long time to gain trust in people again."
Holopainen has previously described the split as the most difficult thing he ever had to do. Turunen, for her part, once put it more finally: "Maybe one day I'll forgive, but I will never forget."