Klaus Nomi: The Opera Alien of New York's Underground

At a 1978 New Wave Vaudeville show in New York, a man in a skin-tight spacesuit and clear plastic cape delivered a flawless classical aria, then vanished into smoke like an alien beamed back to his mothership. That was Klaus Nomi, who years earlier had been an usher at a German opera house hiding a superhuman six-octave range.This deep dive follows how a boy born into the chaos of postwar Germany reinvented himself as a subterranean New York icon, collided with rock royalty, and became one of the earliest high-profile figures from the arts community to die of AIDS.His childhood collision of disciplined opera and forbidden American pop and Elvis recordsRejection by the German academy for wanting to train as a countertenor, and his double life as an usherHis icy operatic covers of 1960s pop backed by cold synthesizers in the East Village sceneThe David Bowie meeting that led to a 1979 Saturday Night Live performance and his signature triangle suitHis final Baroque collar that hid his illness, and his lonely death in 1983 at age 39