Premièred at Glyndebourne in October 1994 and subsequently performed in the UK, Austria, Germany and Holland, The Second Mrs Kong was the result of a collaboration between the American writer Russell Hoban and British composer Harrison Birtwistle. The operaʼs reception has tended to emphasise the disparity between Hobanʼs diverse and eclectic interests, which emerge not only in the libretto but also in his novels and essays, and Birtwistleʼs more introspective and linear approach. Possible connections between Hobanʼs aesthetics and Birtwistleʼs music have generally been disregarded. I argue, however, that the operaʼs main aesthetic concerns – namely, the mediation of images through ideas and the workings of image-identification in diverse media – are shaped by a productive exchange between librettist and composer. The clearest expression of this interaction is the love between Kong, who embodies ‘the idea of’ King Kong from the 1933 RKO film, and Pearl, a character drawn from Vermeerʼs iconic painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. The representation of these visual icons in The Second Mrs Kong is inflected by Birtwistleʼs own views on images, by his attempts to find musical analogues for visual techniques, as revealed especially in his sketches, and by his lively engagement with Hobanʼs ideas.