Klaus Nomi (born Klaus Sperber) was a German-born countertenor and performance artist based in New York whose otherworldly fusion of opera, electronic music, and avant-garde theatricality made him one of the most distinctive figures of the late 1970s-early 1980s underground. He died of AIDS in 1983, among the first public figures to succumb to the epidemic.
Created a genre-defying synthesis of classical opera and new wave art that prefigured many developments in art-pop and theatrical performance; his death became a symbolic moment in the AIDS crisis narrative.
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