‘A place where flecks of magic are chipped or hacked from mundanity – where the familiar and domestic are heightened or warped’ is how Oliver Leith sums up what he wanted to convey with Last Days, his debut opera. Its highly touted premiere at the Linbury Theatre in 2022 marked the culmination of his three-year composer residency at the Royal Opera. For source material, Leith and his librettist Matt Copson turned to the indie director Gus Van Sant’s film of the same name from 2005, which presents a fictionalised treatment of Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994.

The association with an enormously influential icon from popular culture drew attention from beyond the opera world to the London production as well as the American premiere in Los Angeles in early 2024. But far from a biographical depiction of Cobain’s tragic demise, Last Days focuses on the transformation of celebrity into the mythology of the contemporary world. It emphasises the archetypal resonance of its protagonist, renamed Blake, as a rock star who becomes sacrificial victim to the alienation that has made him into a messiah.

The opera portrays Blake as a passive presence, recently escaped from rehab to his rundown cabin in the ‘wilderness’. The only action involves a sequence of episodes in which figures intrude from the outside world, attempting in vain to engage with Blake: a Bergmanesque ‘Groundskeeper’ (symbol of impending doom), the star’s persistently phoning manager, a driver delivering equipment, a pair of missionary Mormons, freeloading housemates, a stalking ‘super fan’ and a private investigator.

All of these are caricatures, to which Leith applies a variety of operatic mannerisms that sound surreal rather than ironic. In one poignant scene towards the end of this 95-minute experimental opera, Blake finally picks up a guitar and briefly strums an accompaniment (played, with luxury casting, by Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe) to a ravishing aria sung in Italian by his intrepid ‘super fan’ (soprano Patricia Auchterlonie). Otherwise, Leith has no interest in evoking specific references to Nirvana – though the score’s fascinating variety of distorted and bleary sounds might be heard more generally as echoing a kind of grunge sensibility.

Blake is cast as a non-singing role whose spare utterances are mumbled. Much was made of the effectiveness with which the French actress Agathe Rousselle, shrouded in a big green coat and white sunglasses, embodied Blake’s states of dissociation in the stage production (costumes designed by Balenciaga). But on the recording – made in 2023 with most of the same artists who created the premiere – the character’s few intentionally indecipherable words barely register. (The booklet, which misnumbers the scenes in the third act, stintingly provides only a few photographs.)

Still, the unforced originality and hauntingly suggestive power of Leith’s music remain gripping as a purely audio experience. In lieu of a conventional orchestra, the strings comprising 12 Ensemble, the keyboard/percussion GBSR Duo and a spectrum of electronics and sampled sounds generate a hallucinogenic atmosphere of relentless melancholia in slow motion that allows us to perceive everything that unfolds through Blake’s perspective.

Evoking a 21st-century Dowland, Leith sustains this sense of lament even as he transforms the sonic detritus of daily life: a bowl of cereal being filled, a pile of bottles being swept after a chaotic party. He weaves eclectic references into his distinctive palette as well – most strikingly a soaring, imitation verismo aria cresting on a high F sharp (reverberantly pre-recorded by the indie-pop artist Caroline Polachek). In the one moment that pierces Blake’s self-destructive fog, she sings of loving life. But the transience of her song only intensifies his desire to embrace the finality promised by the Groundskeeper of ‘a morrow-less day’.