The Cold Song: a 1691 aria written for a bass, sung by a countertenor

In the third act of King Arthur a deity is woken against its will. It is the Cold Genius, the Spirit of Winter, and the only thing it asks for is to be allowed to die again.

Henry Purcell wrote that scene in 1691, to a libretto by John Dryden. Two hundred and ninety years later a German countertenor calling himself Klaus Nomi put it on a pop record, under the title “The Cold Song”.

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An aria in which everything shakes

In the Frost Scene it is Cupid who wakes the Cold Genius. What comes out is a harmonically adventurous aria, with harsh dissonances and strings played sul ponticello, close to the bridge, to get the timbre of biting cold.

The shaking is not something a later performer added. It is written into the instructions: Purcell has the strings and the singer play and sing with a quavering sound on every single note.

Dryden’s text runs to seven lines and closes on one request.

Let me, let me freeze again to death.

Purcell gives those words to a bass, the lowest voice there is.

Who sings it in 1981

Klaus Sperber was born on 24 January 1944 in Immenstadt, Bavaria. As a teenager he worked as an usher at the Deutsche Oper in West Berlin, then moved to New York, where he found work as a pastry chef.

In 1978 he made his debut at the New Wave Vaudeville at Irving Plaza, dressed as a spaceman in a see-through vinyl cape, singing an operatic aria. Klaus Nomi was born there.

“The Cold Song” turned up on his first record, Klaus Nomi, in 1981. It is the sixth of ten tracks and runs a little over four minutes.

The difference is the register. Purcell had written for a bass, and Nomi is a countertenor: the same part, instead of going down, goes up. The quaver in the score stays exactly where it was.

Munich, 9 December 1982

At the Klassik Rock Nacht in the Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle he sang three pieces. Two were with Trio: Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again” and “After the Fall”. The third was “The Cold Song”, with Eberhard Schoener and the Pro Musica Orchestra Munich.

He sang it in baroque costume, with Kaposi’s sarcoma already on him. Klaus Nomi died on 6 August 1983, aged thirty nine, of AIDS.

What is left is an aria written to set frost to music, which three centuries later found itself saying something else without a word being changed.