First came Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film Last Days which depicted the last days of Kurt Cobain, now, under the same name, comes an opera which will be performed by the Royal Opera House in London.
As NME music daily explains, Van Sant’s film was centered on a young musician called Blake, and was loosely based on Cobain’s last days. Cobain died by suicide in 1994 aged 27.
A description from the Royal Opera House says that the opera “plunges into the torment that created a modern myth” and that Blake is “haunted by objects, visitors and memories distracting him from his true purpose – self-destruction.”
The opera has been composed by Oliver Leith, the Royal Opera House’s composer-in-residence. Directed by Copson and Anna Morrissey, it is due to be staged this October at the venue’s Linbury Theatre.
Leith said he was a “massive” Nirvana fan and that “the music soundtracked my teens. It’s some of the first music I learned to play on the guitar.”
“I owe a lot of how I now make music to the sound of grunge from that time – I had never really thought about where my experimental mess and repetitions had come from.”