Tomorrow at the Royal Opera House in London, Oliver Leith’s opera about Kurt Cobain’s death will have its premiere.
Kurt Cobain, singer, guitarist and main songwriter of the American band Nirvana, was one of the last great myths of rock’n’roll. His suicide on 5 April 1994, at the age of 27, sent shockwaves around the world, but today, almost thirty years later, his name says very little to a whole generation of music fans who were not even born at the time of his death.
For the young British composer Oliver Leith (born 1990), however, the music of Cobain and Nirvana did provide the soundtrack to his adolescence, and he has argued that much of his music-making – its “experimental messiness” and “repetitions” – draws directly from grunge, and his figure did deserve the starring role in his first opera, Last Days. The opera, which opens tomorrow Friday at the Linbury Theatre in London – one of the venues attached to the Royal Opera House – where four performances will be staged until Tuesday 11, has a libretto written by artist Matt Copson and is based on the film of the same title directed by Gus Van Sant in 2005, a fictional account of the last fifteen days of the life of “Blake”, a character directly inspired by Kurt Cobain. Copson and Leith began writing Last Days during the pandemic, but it cannot be considered biographical, but rather, as Copson explains, speaks to the current state we find ourselves in: “You talk to every young person – everyone is exposed to a degree that they weren’t before and there are issues of privacy that constantly emerges”. The essential idea behind the opera is: “Am I an individual or am I a member of society? Can I express myself freely or can I not? What does it even mean to express? What is freedom?”
Last Days features an aria sung by American alternative pop singer-songwriter Caroline Polachek, formerly of indie band Chairlif, while the character of “Blake” is played by an actress: Agathe Rousselle, the star of Julia Ducournau’s haunting film Titane, winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.