Brooke was the 'Golden Boy' of the Bloomsbury set, a coterie of prominent artistic and conceptual thinkers that dominated English cultural life before and between the two world wars and included writer Virginia Woolf.

Brooke's celebrity immortalised him as a hero of the Great War, when in fact his was an ignominious demise by mosquito.

With great wit and irony, The Hive chronicles the terrible post-mortem 'swarming' of the self-interested after Brooke's death, with Brooke wandering through the opera as a hapless ghost commentating on the obscene manipulations of his work and estate.

Written in 1990 by maturing Melbourne enfant terrible Sam Sejavka, a man whose own life was immortalised in the 1987 film Dogs in Space, The Hive won that year's Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Drama.

Described by the writer as 'an ensemble piece that works with verbal sound textures', in 2002 ChamberMade commissioned Sejavka to conceive the work as an opera libretto. Brilliant young Australian composer Nicholas Vines first came to ChamberMade's attention in 2001 during their concert series 'From the Lip', with music of tremendous imagination, energy and drama demonstrating a highly creative use of the human voice. The following year Vines received a Harvard University Music Scholarship and a Menzies Fellowship and joined forces with Sejavka to create this production of The Hive.