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 records
• Rejection by the German academy for wanting to train as a countertenor, and his double life as an usher
• His icy operatic covers of 1960s pop backed by cold synthe ...