Conventionally, suicides provide opera with their dramatic climaxes – think Tosca, Götterdämmerung, Werther. But in Oliver Leith’s Last Days, the suicide of the central character is the opera, an inevitability from the opening moments until the bleak, frozen ending 90 minutes later. Its starting point was the 2005 film by Gus Van Sant from which Leith and his librettist Matt Copson borrowed both title and plot, and which in its turn was loosely based on the final days of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana.
