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Michael Aspinall, who has died aged 86, was the Surprising Soprano, a one-man drag act known for parodying opera’s greatest divas and murdering its best-loved arias; he was equally well known for his unorthodox take on Schubert lieder, notably in his engrossing rendition of Der Erlkönig, which, like everything he did, was rooted in serious research.
Tall, sandy-haired and grotesquely draped in feathers and sequins, Aspinall was a cross between Danny La Rue and Anna Russell, the 1950s comic singer famed for her Wagnerian send-ups. “I am the only prima donna to visit Australia who shaved in the plane on the way,” he said in 1977.
Alone or with his company of seven, La San Carlo di Roma, Aspinall began performing in 1970, when friends in Rome persuaded him to parody the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor for a revue. Most singers, he said, did not mind being brought down a peg or two. “Oh Michael, you did some awful things to me,” laughed Joan Sutherland after a private performance in 1980 for the soprano and her conductor husband, Richard Bonynge.
Montserrat Caballé, another great soprano, enlisted his help to create her cadenzas. His targets, however, were more usually the singers of yesteryear, Adelina Patti, Jenny Lind or Maria Callas, though to some he conjured up uncanny memories of Florence Foster Jenkins.
His appearances in Britain were all too rare. His impersonation of Donizetti’s comic matron in The Prima Donna’s Mother Is a Drag, at the 1972 Camden Festival was, noted Opera magazine, “brilliantly effective because it was not too overwhelmingly grotesque in either appearance or voice. Even the parody of a soprano’s vocal and bodily antics… had the sense of artistry behind it.”
For opera lovers, Aspinall’s parodies were amusingly incisive; for opera haters, he offered long-awaited revenge on the art form. “He has a merciless ear and eye for the idiosyncrasies of more orthodox prima donnas, their little vocal tricks, their facial contortions, their weeping gestures,” observed the Financial Times. Martin Bernheimer described him in the Los Angeles Times as “a British semi-baritone with a deliriously extended falsetto range and an even more deliriously extended imagination”.
George Michael Aspinall was born in Stockport on October 31 1939, the son of George Aspinall and Vera, née Makin. He came from a family whose business was in hotels and restaurants; a great aunt had been Nellie Melba’s cook.
At 11 he saw Madama Butterfly, an experience that displaced his ambition to be an actor with a desire to sing, though he was barred from the choir at Manchester Grammar School. After reading languages at the University of Manchester he taught English in London while studying singing with Anthony Benskin, who made his students sing scales in a high register.
Still formally a baritone, he took further lessons in Rome with the 92-year-old Vincenzo D’Alessandro, specialising in the bel canto method. He discovered a talent for falsetto singing while imitating the mistakes of young singers he was teaching.
Paolo Poli, the celebrated Italian comic, introduced him to musical satire and drag, and they began touring Italy together. At first he was convinced the conceit would work only among musicians but soon found that even those who did not know opera “laughed at the farcical side”. He also appeared as himself in Walton’s Façade and was occasionally seen in full-scale opera, most notably as Mother Goose in Ken Russell’s staging of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in Florence in 1982 conducted by Riccardo Chailly.
Aspinall, whose apartment in Rome was packed with old 78s, faded photographs and meticulously copied operatic arias, wrote scholarly articles about vocal ornamentation in Rossini’s music. He also presented record recitals of famous singers of the past and contributed informative essays for re-issues of historical recordings.
In the late 1990s he moved to a palazzo in Naples, where he baked elaborate cakes and pastries, and joined a Gospel reading circle. “It is very important to me to sing, and I have found a way in which I can,” he said of his career. “And people will pay to listen to me.”
Michael Aspinall, born October 31 1939, died July 10 2026
