The man on the stage wore white face paint, black lipstick and a triangular plastic tuxedo, and the song he sang was by Henry Purcell. Klaus Nomi had come to New York from Germany with a remarkable countertenor voice, a taste for David Bowie and a day job as a pastry chef. Downtown audiences raised on punk did not know what had hit them. Nomi’s version of the Cold Song, slow, glacial and very strange, appeared on his 1981 debut album and became his signature. When he died of AIDS-related illness in 1983, it took on the feel of an elegy, and it has been circulating ever since.
The song was already strange in 1691. It belongs to the most daring scene in King Arthur, the semi-opera Purcell wrote with John Dryden. To show the blind princess Emmeline the power of love, a magician conjures a frozen country. Cupid flies down and wakes its ruler, the Cold Genius, who rises reluctantly from under the snow. He is not grateful.
The words
Dryden’s text, now in the public domain, is seven lines of pure grumpiness:
What power art thou, who from below Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow From beds of everlasting snow? See’st thou not how stiff and wondrous old, Far unfit to bear the bitter cold, I can scarcely move or draw my breath? Let me, let me freeze again to death.
How Purcell makes it shiver
The trick is a single instruction in the score. Purcell has the strings play repeated notes on every beat, pulsing on the same pitch, and the singer does the same, breaking up each syllable. To a Baroque audience it was an instantly recognisable sound effect: trembling. Under the shaking, the harmony crawls through slow, chromatic chords that never quite get warm. The vocal line rises in pain on “unwillingly and slow” and keeps sinking back.
The effect is half comic, half eerie. The Cold Genius is a creaky old spirit complaining about being disturbed, but he is also asking, quite seriously, to die. Purcell plays it entirely straight, and that is why it works.
What follows is just as clever. Cupid answers him, and a whole chorus of Cold People enters, their teeth chattering on the same stuttering notes, until love thaws them and the music breaks into warmth.
The cover versions
Nomi’s version is the famous one, and it brought the aria to an audience that had never heard of King Arthur. Sting recorded it in 2009 on If on a Winter’s Night…, a set of winter songs. It turns up in films, fashion shows and countless countertenor recitals. A song written for a bass, about an old man who cannot bear the cold, has turned into a lament about loneliness and mortality. Dryden would probably have been baffled. Purcell, who wrote catches about drinking and theatre songs about everything, might have been delighted.
Hear it in context, though. On a good recording of King Arthur, the Frost Scene runs for about fifteen minutes, and the Cold Song is its frozen heart.