Last Days

Director Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film Last Days charts the final hours of the fictional Blake, a thinly veiled version of Nirvana’s frontman Kurt Cobain who took his own life in 1994 at the age of 27. Desperate, precious moments are punctuated by everyday intrusions, and Van Sant manages to extract a beautifully shot portrait of mundanity, almost Beckett-like in its forensic examination of basic existence. Composer Oliver Leith and librettist/director Matt Copson both loved the film and were convinced that it was ripe for another treatment. Their operatic version of Last Days ended up being conceived during lockdown. The parallels between the opera and the experience of physical and emotional imprisonment during the pandemic, Leith insists, were not intended. Yet, there is little doubt that, in 2024, audiences will at least relate to the boredom and irritations that Blake encounters while on his final, tragic, and inexorable downward spiral. Like the film, the opera Last Days is scored for a small ensemble cast, who variously assume the voice of Blake’s manager Trip (whose phone calls are ingeniously scripted in the rapid scattergun delivery of a cattle auctioneer), superfans, doorstepping Mormons (who morph into housemates), delivery driver, groundskeeper, and private investigator. With their petty concerns and self-serving demands, they circle around Blake, a non-singing, acting role. Blake becomes an observer of his own fate which appears to lie in the hands of these peripheral characters, played by a superb roster of singers. It was Van Sant’s focus on triviality, which Leith calls the “anti-dramatic dramatic,” that intrigued both composer and librettist, rather than the story of Cobain’s death in itself. “In my work, I often explore the everyday, things that are mundane,” says Leith, “but you can use the story of Cobain to frame everything in the opera. Every single thing happens for the last time, so they’re imbued with something more poignant and foreboding.” The score calls for string orchestra, keyboards, guitar, and percussionist, who enjoys a significant role on a variety of instruments including a virtuosic part for steel pan. Throughout, Leith achieves what he calls a “haze” that surrounds the (in)action, the result of playing the same notes on string instruments with multiple variations of tuning. “With the strings I’m always trying to thicken the sound,” he says. “I always thought of opera as being quite a strange thing in that obviously everyone sings everything. But we might extend it: what did the plates sing?; what did the bin bags sing? You can hear all this real sound turning into music. But for that to work, it feels like the sort of ‘amniotic fluid of the world’ needs to be quite thick, to imagine that you’re in a sort of soup.” Nothing is incidental. At the start of Act I, Scene 2, for example, the doorbell is not merely a sound effect but an integral part of the score. Strings screech out a boiling kettle at the end of Act III, Scene 3. And in Act II Scene 5, where Blake clears the stage of empty bottles, Leith creates a bespoke instrument for the job: “They’re clusters of tuned bottles filled with water and suspended on bungees,” he explains, “so they can be played really like a keyboard.” Even the sound of breakfast cereal being poured into a bowl makes it onto the musical page. It takes us cinematically from Scene 7 to Scene 8. As the action moves to the outdoors, the sound morphs from the rustle of food to the white noise of rain. “The original film is really about amazing shots and sound, and how they’re linked. So, often we were trying to find the answer for how to camera pan in opera,” says Leith. “Obviously, you achieve that effect with lighting and everything as well, but was there a way to do it with sound? It turns out that most of the time you can, because sound is so malleable.” The final scenes bring Blake’s isolation into sharp relief. Even his death seems unremarkable. Leith surrounds Blake in an atmosphere of futility and emptiness with elegiac, Bartókian smears of sound, followed by overlapping, claustrophobic, and anxious minimalist motifs. It’s as if what we are witnessing is not the end but a continuation of the ordinary, Blake’s end tragic in its uneventfulness.