Opera and Pop: Planet Nomi

When Klaus Nomi died on August 6, 1983 in New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center as a result of an HIV infection, I found out about it in a marginal note in our local newspaper, the Braunschweiger Zeitung. Back then, I got up at 4 a.m. every day for months to stuff freshly printed wrapping paper for dead fish into their subscribers’ gold-leaf mailboxes. That was supposed to finance my driving license. I crossed half of the county town where I lived on my gearless bike and slept in at school.

When I read the message, I couldn’t believe it. Artists who emigrated overseas were of no interest to common West Germans; they were considered crazy and conceited. Nomi had achieved some notoriety in New York, France and Japan. In the Federal Republic of Germany, people still couldn’t talk to their enfants perdus; Nomi was certainly well received in the media. I knew him, so the others could have known him too. His extraordinary voice sounded like it came from a distant planet. It was probably his habitus that was off-putting, that it didn’t fit into the worldview, and that for the gray masses it broke every bourgeois framework in the West (that meant little). Even more likely, his open gayness was seen as an affront.

Gay plague and gay hunting

Nomi was one of the first prominent AIDS victims. With his death, the epidemic had arrived in Germany, where it had previously been used in the media as a fear disease and smugly stigmatized as the “gay plague”. One month after Nomi’s death, the first AIDS aid organizations were founded in Germany.

Two years later, in Beverly Hills, on the other side of the States, the actor Rock Hudson, known as, died the Womanizer of Hollywood. By the mid-1940s, the two-meter giant who loved men had become one of the greatest womanizers in cinema history alongside Doris Day, Elizabeth Taylor and Gina Lollobrigida. Immediately after his death, the US government doubled the budget for AIDS research.

nd.DieWoche – our weekly newsletter

With our weekly newsletter nd.DieWoche look at the most important topics of the week and read them Highlights our Saturday edition on Friday. Get your free subscription here.

In 1986 I moved into a two-person shared apartment with a nurse who was infected with AIDS. “God’s watchdog” Cardinal Meisner described the immune deficiency disease at this time as “God’s visitation” because of the sinful behavior of homos; CSU Interior State Secretary Peter Gauweiler as well as the then young CSU politician Horst Seehofer gave free rein to their fantasies of interning HIV-positive people.

After me the opera

The Lower Saxony publisher Andreas Reiffer, always good for small sensations, has now brought the world’s first Klaus Nomi biography onto the market shortly before the 41st anniversary of his death. Why hasn’t anyone thought of filling this gaping void before? In order to get to the bottom of the Nomi phenomenon, the Frankfurt publicist Monika Hempel did considerable Sisyphean work of combing through a variety of living contemporary witnesses and, at the same time, spent a week plowing through the estate, which was divided into 15 boxes, in the Harvard theater library.

Nomi was born Klaus Jürgen Sperber in 1944 in Immenstadt-Ratholz in Oberallgäu (and not in Berlin, as an advertisement from the German Aids Association printed in the book suggests), where he lived for the first four years with his mother, an “elegant lady «. Then we went back to the bombed-out restaurant. He dropped out of school at the age of 16 and then trained as a positive retoucher and typesetter. He wanted to be an opera singer, nothing else.

Musical stars were Elvis Presley and Maria Callas. After working as an extra on stages in Essen, he wants to train his voice (tenor) to become a countertenor at the University of Music in Berlin. It is not the time of the countertenors. It’s also possible to be self-taught. At the Deutsche Oper he works as a box closer, elevator operator, night watchman, and girl for everything – the main thing is opera. He belts out arias in the Berlin Kleist Casino, a gay hustler nightclub in Schöneberg, which until the early 1930s was also a meeting place for National Socialist homosexuals such as Ernst Röhm, Paul Röhrbein and Philipp Prinz von Hessen. Among the guests: Hubert Fichte and Andreas Baader.

In 1972 (still with a long hair and full beard) Sperber made a short appearance as a mezzo-soprano in the first long film “Ex und hopp” by the gay filmmaker Lothar Lambert. In it he sings a Wagner aria in the Schöneberg bar “Der Leuchtturm”. Even back then, his singing – he had a vocal range of six octaves – was not trusted. “I told him to deliberately sing a few notes wrong so that people wouldn’t think it was a playback,” says Lambert.

At some point Klaus Sperber gets fed up: the opera won’t work out – the idea is good, but Germany isn’t ready yet. In 1973 he flies to the USA, a one-way ticket to fame. The oil crisis has the world in a stranglehold. New York City is officially bankrupt, but the subculture is booming. Sperber settles down in an apartment on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan’s trendy East Village district. The area is run down and the rents are cheap.

Sparrowhawk isn’t Nomi yet. The main source of income is his “baking business” – as an untrained part-time pastry chef with self-made lime pie and Linzer torte, he supplies cafés and restaurants – even the World Trade Center and the Guggenheim Museum – and gets a slot for a show on local cable TV in which he achieved dubious fame as the “Singing Confectioner”. Ira Siff, who teaches singing at the Metropolitan Opera Guild, is the first professional to recognize his gigantic falsetto voice. In 1977 he had a role in a gay opera parody of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Then everything comes in quick succession.

Becoming Nomi

Klaus Sperber finds his artistic identity, combining his countertenor with the clinical and minimalist new wave sound that rattles out of the speakers of the local punk clubs. He sings Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again”, pieces that come from Dada circles (such as “Total Eclipse”) and interprets opera arias (like Henry Purcell’s “Cold Song” from the baroque opera “King Arthur”). Nobody can classify his incredibly high, androgynous tone anymore, let alone top it. The aesthetic work of art Klaus Nomi is created, an anagram of “Omni” (Latin: everything, everyone), based on a US sci-fi magazine. Aliens were also very popular in the Federal Republic of Germany at the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s; Erich von Däniken’s books topped the bestseller lists, and David Bowie provided the soundtrack.

Sperber also stylized his fictional character Nomi in the UFO world of the USA as an alien and deliberately forced the German accent to emphasize this strangeness. His breakthrough in New York in 1978 was a midnight elf-like appearance in a colorful vaudeville number revue in Irving Plaza, where the purest singing emerged from him, an aria from “Samson et Dalila” by Camille Saint-Saëns in a woman’s voice as clear as a bell, higher and higher , as if Callas were on stage.

Klaus Sperber had shed his skin and an it named Nomi replaced him. The aliens had landed. They were hyperqueer. Klaus Nomi was the world-saving ringleader in a fairytale world made of sterile make-up, while not much later Udo Lindenberg had barefoot minors in nightgowns swarming around him. The frozen gaze and robotic man-machine movements far away from Kraftwerk became his trademark. This also included sharp-edged lips accentuated with black paint, a kissing mouth like a bat. Nomi’s face was made up like that of a Kabuki actor, the range was drawn from the cabaret of the 1920s, from silent films and German expressionism to the synth-influenced new wave sound (“Dance to Mussolini!”). Singing, chirping comic heroes with Dadaist oeuvre as well as cubist clothing and hairstyles and twilight-resistant hermaphrodite creatures fluttered origami-like through orbit. Nomi preferred to perform his arias in a plastic tuxedo or a cling film costume; many of the clothing designs were his own. His musicians wore ski and hockey masks, the dancers were wrapped as cellophane mummies.

Ober-Alien as Vitamin B

At this time, David Bowie had long since become stuck in futurism. His voice wasn’t suitable for combining opera and pop music. In 1979, he hired Nomi and his friend Joey Arias (comedian, actor, Cirque du Soleil performer, drag queen, fantastic jazz singer and LGBT pioneer) as background singers for the NBC show “Saturday Night Live.” It became the best performance (before Devo) in the program’s history. While Bowie sang “The Man Who Sold The World” and “TVC-15” in a Tristan Tzara costume, Nomi ran through the picture with a pink plush poodle. Bowie was the star. Nomi, for whom this gig marked the final breakthrough, a planet. He became an advertising medium for Fiorucci and Jägermeister.

In 1981, the major label RCA France released his debut album. It was sold out after a week. Nomi received a gold record. He went on a world tour. Shortly after he finished it, night fell.

Grand Finale

Nomi’s last appearance was in 1982 at Eberhard Schoener’s third “Classic Rock Night” in Munich. Heavily marked, he sang the “Cold Song” again, which tells of frost and freezing. The aria ends with the words: “Let me/ Freeze again to death!” You could feel the pain. The myth of the supernatural and unapproachable had been thwarted by a simple sexually transmitted pathogen. The visionary’s big dream, a space opera, would no longer come true.

The German single from his first album was “Total Eclipse,” an ironic doomsday anthem about the fear of a nuclear catastrophe. “In deliberately artless chanting, Nomi explained how pukes dressed in Lacoste polo shirts trigger the catastrophe that turns us all into French fries,” writes Hempel. Klaus Nomi died on Hiroshima Memorial Day.

Monika Hempel: Klaus Nomi. Voice in orbit. Verlag Andreas Reiffer, 288 pages, hardcover, €22.

Become a member of the nd.Genossenschaft!

Since January 1, 2022, the »nd« will be published as an independent left-wing newspaper owned by the staff and readers. Be there and support media diversity and visible left-wing positions as a cooperative member. Fill out the membership application now.

More information on www.dasnd.de/genossenschaft