The throngs striding across the Plaza at Lincoln Center in groups of two or four wore flowers in their hair. A day at the opera always provides an excuse to dress up, but this balmy Sunday afternoon in May brought a distinct look: braids piled atop the head, sweeping tiered skirts, embroidered puebla dresses in shades of tangerine, raspberry, and turquoise. One opera-goer strode into the Met in a silk shawl printed with the woman of the hour, Frida Kahlo, who has found herself the protagonist in Gabriela Lena Frank’s first opera, El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego.
Kahlo’s afterlife, in which she’s been reembodied as a symbol—of feminism, of fashion, of Mexicanidad—is, in many ways, a reality of her own making. It is, after all, her face, her unibrow, her spider monkeys, her huipiles, and her physical and emotional pain in those iconic self-portraits. Still, it is hard to imagine that the artist could have ever anticipated the extent to which her image and the details of her life, including her turbulent relationship with the famed muralist Diego Rivera, would suffuse North American popular culture. The refrigerator magnets, the tattoos, the Etsy votive candles, the street art, the throw pillows, the tourist trap trinkets—Frida Kahlo is a disabled Communist turned billion dollar industry.
In the decades following Kahlo’s death in 1954, and Rivera’s three years later, every aspect of their shared life has been exhumed and dissected at length. El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego then necessarily begs the question: What more can be gleaned by putting these two figures in an operatic context?
The show, which is sponsored by Rolex and running until June 5, is about “trying to make them speak to each other the way they probably never could [in real life],” says Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor and musical director of the Met Opera. The plot of Frida y Diego, which first debuted in San Diego in 2022, is a simple, reverse Orpheus and Eurydice tale. On Dia de los Muertos, Frida (played by Argentinian-American mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard) leaves the underworld to reunite with her estranged husband (portrayed by Spanish baritone Carlos Álvarez). By elevating these titans of Mexican art into the mythic heights of opera, where emotions are all-encompassing, Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz give Frida and Diego the opportunity for a reconciliation they never had.
“Because it’s an opera, you don’t want necessarily to sit there and have a linear story,” says Nézet-Séguin. “You’re expecting something more like magical realism. There’s more freedom, I would say, with it.”
The Met Opera sets, which draw liberally from both artists’ visual lexicons and motifs, are vivid scaffolding for the psychodrama (in the case of a barren crimson tree, quite literally). Yet, in eliding so many details of the couple’s relationship, something comes out in the wash. Some of the Kahlo and Rivera’s most interesting and deepest-seated passions—for instance, their extensive activism with the Mexican Communist Party that led Leon Trotsky right to their blue doorstep or Kahlo’s lesbian affairs with the likes of Georgia O’Keefe and Chavela Vargas—make their way into the opera only tangentially. An actor named Leonardo sings in a warbling falsetto and dons Greta Garbo drag for his night on earth, lingering around the show’s edges, while a brief, musical interlude sees Frida and Diego lamenting Mexico’s poor in front of a pile of box crates, resembling a Mayan pyramid.
For Nézet-Séguin, the show hinges on this moment. “They keep arguing the whole time. When they start reconnecting again, it’s through their social beliefs and their activism. The most tender moment of the opera is actually when they talk about politics.” But then, the moment is swept away again by a chorus of skeleton dancers.
Perhaps, as with Kahlo’s image, the particulars of the show have become secondary to what it represents. Frida y Diego is part of a larger push by the financially-embattled Met Opera to extend a hand to fresh audiences, especially younger, more diverse members, through new works. By their account, it’s working. The season opener, the modern opera The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, added several new shows to accommodate demand, as did Tristan und Isolde, which placed the medieval romance within a cutting-edge staging. For Nézet-Séguin, the 18-show season is about balance, which, at its best, can illuminate new qualities in all.
“There was a sense when I first started guest conducting here,” he says, “that sometimes there was too much of a sense of routine. And now, because we do new works, we see the old works—La Bohème, La Traviata—with new eyes.”
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