Freddie Mercury was inspired by Richard Dadd's painting The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke at the Tate Gallery in London. The fantasy-based lyrics make direct reference to characters and vignettes detailed in the painting and in Dadd's companion poem, Elimination of a Picture & its Subject—called The Feller's Master Stroke. Characters include Queen Mab, Waggoner Will, the Tatterdemalion, and others. The use of the word "quaere" in the twice-repeated line "What a quaere fellow" has no reference to Mercury's sexuality, according to Roger Taylor.
In some markets the album included a fold-out cover with a reproduction of the painting. Author Neil Gaiman wrote about the painting and the album on his blog:
Reason tells me that I would have first encountered the painting itself, the enigmatically titled "Fairy Feller's Master Stroke," reproduced, pretty much full-sized, in the fold-out cover of a Queen album, at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, and it made no impression upon me at all. That's one of the odd things about it. You have to see it in the flesh, paint on canvas, the real thing, which hangs, mostly, when it isn't travelling, in the Pre-Raphaelite room of the Tate Gallery, out of place among the grand gold-framed Pre-Raphaelite beauties, all of them so much more huge and artful than the humble fairy court walking through the daisies, for it to become real. And when you see it several things will become apparent; some immediately, some eventually.
For the intricately arranged studio recording, Mercury played harpsichord as well as piano, and Roy Thomas Baker played the castanets. Taylor called this song Queen's "biggest stereo experiment", referring to the use of panning in the mix. The song was performed only a few times during the Queen II Tour, and there was thought to be no live recording of the song until 2014, when it was released on Live at the Rainbow '74. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_II#%22The_Fairy_Feller's_Master-Stroke%22
