Kurt Cobain Estate Blasts Opera About Nirvana Frontman’s Final Days
The estate of Kurt Cobain has issued a statement about an opera adapted from the 2005 Gus Van Sant film Last Days.
In a statement to Consequence of Sound, the estate said, “‘Last Days’ has been created and written without permission. This show, just like the movie, is an unauthorized attempt to benefit from the brief meeting set up with Kurt and Gus Van Zant. This one meeting has been exploited for profit for thirty years now and enough is enough.”
As previously reported, the Last Days opera is a production taking place at the Royal Opera House in London. The Royal Opera House’s composer-in-residence Oliver Leith told The Guardian in April the production “…plunges into the torment that created a modern myth.” Leith added, “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.”
The spokesperson for the Royal Opera House responded to the Cobain estate saying, ” The Royal Opera’s production of ‘Last Days’ is adapted from Gus Van Sant’s cult film of the same name, released in 2005. It is a fictionalized account, and was produced with the permissions of Gus Van Sant and HBO.”
