Eternal Embrace

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, art history’s greatest couple, find lasting love in the underworld in composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s captivating opera El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, set to a libretto by Nilo Cruz. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Met premiere of this beguiling story of love and death. By Matt Dobkin 

In real life, Mexican artist Diego Rivera was denied his final wish: to be cremated and his ashes placed with those of Frida Kahlo, his third of four wives and the fellow artist with whom he would forever be linked. When Rivera died in 1957, at the age of 70, his family (and presumably his fourth and final wife) ignored his stated request on so-called religious grounds, and he was given a grand public funeral and burial in a special tomb in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men in Mexico City’s largest cemetery.

In the opera El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, however, which has its Met premiere on May 14, Rivera at last gets his wish, reuniting in the underworld with Frida on Mexico’s Day of the Dead.

“That was something that really stayed with me as I did my research,” says librettist Nilo Cruz. “Diego, at the end of his life, with that wish to be infused with his beloved.”

Composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz

A shared fascination with both the Day of the Dead festival and with Kahlo herself created an instant connection between Cruz and composer Gabriela Lena Frank. Although their opera premiered in 2022, its origins date back to 2007, when Frank was approached by Arizona Opera with the idea of composing a Frida-focused new work, and her agent suggested Cruz as the librettist, on the heels of his Pulitzer Prize–winning play Anna in the Tropics. The pair met and immediately hit it off. “I felt like he was an old friend already,” the composer says. “His plays demonstrated he understood theater and the performance of words. And his writing is so musical and so lyrical.”

Cruz, though an avowed Kahlo fan, was hesitant about giving the artist the operatic treatment. “I’ve always loved Frida, but I said to Gabriela, I’m not interested in writing a biopic. It’s been done”—this was the era when Fridamania was heating up, led by the success of the Salma Hayek film, directed by Julie Taymor —“and also because Frida’s work is so autobiographical to begin with.”

Frank, who had discovered Kahlo’s work as a child through an art book her mother had given her, felt a serious kinship with Frida from day one. Like Frida, she came from a family with a Latina mother (in Frank’s case from Peru) and a white father; both were “short and brown,” as Frank says; and both were faced with disabilities. Kahlo, of course, was injured by a trolley accident that forced her to wear a series of painful undergarments and physical contraptions simply to keep her body together, and Frank has worn hearing aids since childhood to manage a hearing impairment.

A set model by Jon Bausor

Despite her strong Fridaphilia, Frank, like Cruz, felt that a novel approach would be needed to make the artist’s story work as an opera. When she played for him some unrelated music she had written centered around the Day of the Dead, his eyes lit up. The annual El Día de Muertos festival, in which Mexicans honor their deceased loved ones, became the entry point for an opera the pair ended up developing, off and on, for about 15 years (during which time they also collaborated on other material, including the acclaimed Conquest Requiem). El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego finally came to fruition in 2022, with a world premiere at San Diego Opera. The premiere production also had runs in Los Angeles and San Francisco and will be seen in Chicago in 2026, while the Met production, from director Deborah Colker, is brand new. This represents a nearly unprecedented level of early success for a contemporary new opera: for a work not just to premiere, but for it to be so acclaimed and compelling that other companies are impelled to take up the mantle and stage it too.

El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego opens three years after Kahlo’s death. At the start, Rivera arrives in a Mexican village bedecked with marigolds, the vibrant symbol of the Day of the Dead. Physically ailing and lonely without his soulmate, he calls out to Frida; in so doing, he summons Catrina, the trickster keeper of the dead, in the form of an elderly village woman. Back in Mictlan, the Aztec underworld, Catrina insists that Frida return to the realm of the living and lead her husband on his journey toward death. Frida refuses, declaring, in a memorable line, “Why go back to the world? When in life I had two major accidents: the impact of a trolley and the blow of meeting Diego Rivera?” But she relents when a young actor named Leonardo, dressed in drag as his idol Greta Garbo in the film Queen Christina (and sung by a countertenor), encourages Frida to see her temporary earthly return as a chance to reimagine herself in a life without physical pain. The opera ends with Frida and Diego returning to the underworld together, accomplishing the “final dream” of the title. (The principal quartet will be sung at the Met by mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, baritone Carlos Álvarez, soprano Gabriella Reyes, and countertenor Nils Wanderer. “They’re going to be tremendous,” Frank says of her cast.)

If the story sounds decidedly magical-realist, that’s the idea. “Catrina functions as a kind of dramaturg who sets up the rules and boundaries of the opera,” Cruz explains. “Leonardo is also a guide. He’s this androgynous being, an actor who masquerades in order to live between both worlds.” He continues, “I was thinking about the years that Frida spent in New York, when Diego was working on the Rockefeller Center mural, and it was documented that she spent a lot of time at the movies. I thought she probably must have fallen in love with Greta Garbo. And the story of Queen Christina parallels the story of Frida and Diego—she has a limited amount of time to visit her lover.”

A set model by Jon Bausor

To convey this simultaneously dark, humorous, and whimsical tale, Frank says, “I aimed for a sound that’s ancient, as if going to the underworld. That kind of sound, to me, is a very beautiful sound, a rich and lush sound. This is not a folkloric score. Beauty was at the forefront of my mind the entire time. Every scene is lush, every scene is carefully considered in terms of the colors.”

Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, a great champion of new music, will be on the podium to oversee the score, which features fascinating interplays of instruments. “I had to come up with amazing orchestration,” Frank says, “combinations you might not have heard before—two piccolos blending with a celeste, or the doubling of a bass clarinet with a high violin. To me, that sounds like an anaconda going down a river in the moonlight—the sheen of it. It had to be really evocative.” Every scene features marimba, which the composer calls the essential sound of Central America.

Cruz praises the “ancestral quality” of his collaborator’s music. “It’s definitely classical music, but with a mysterious aspect to it and a particular kind of darkness that comes from Latin America.”

For director Deborah Colker, the Brazilian dynamo returning to the Met after the stunning success of her production of Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar last season, Frank’s score “smells like Mexico. It’s not traditional Mexican music, but it has a strong chorus, has this sound of pain, the sound of the possibility of crossing into different worlds. And I like this, because for me, what is important is that death is a part of life. We are singing about life and death all the time.”

Isabel Leonard as Frida Kahlo

One of Cruz’s primary inspirations for the libretto was Kahlo’s 1949 self-portrait The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl, with Frida, front and center, holding Diego in her arms. The painting’s arid landscape and cracked earth are evoked in Colker’s production, with sets and costumes by her Ainadamar collaborator Jon Bausor, who places a gnarled tree in the middle of his otherwise colorful set. Colker’s directive to her designer: “We need to be surrealistic, and we need to go to the body of Frida. We need to be inside her broken body, a body with cracks, with pain. The body is like a tree with arteries, with veins—organic. And this is our set.”

Despite Frida’s physical travails and their representation on stage, Colker, who spent two weeks in Mexico studying the Day of the Dead in preparation for the production, says, “It’s not about serving tragedy, it’s about the opposite. It’s about someone who learns through suffering how to understand people, humanity, life, art, happiness. It’s about art. And art is not just painting or dance or theater. Art is experience. Art is adventure, imagination.” That said, dance will of course figure in choreographer-director Colker’s production, as it did so memorably in Ainadamar. In addition to calling on the singers to move, the show will feature dancers, acrobats, and even breakdancers.

El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego marks the third season in a row the Met has presented an opera in Spanish (“a language that sings so beautifully,” as Cruz says) after a gap of nearly 100 years. But, though this Spanish-language work is being brought to the Met by a Brazilian, Peruvian American, and Cuban American creative team, it’s not lost on this Latin American triumvirate that none of them is actually Mexican. As a result, they’ve approached the material with great respect. “One thing that really struck me, right from the beginning,” Frank asserts, “was how careful we were to honor the Mexican culture as an international team. I think that’s something that Frida and Diego would really embrace. They were celebrities in their lifetime, with international friends. They wanted people from outside of Mexico to engage with their ideas and their artwork.” She sums up the universal appeal of these titanic artists: “Frida and Diego belong to the world.”

Matt Dobkin is the Met’s Creative Content Director.