Racked by unrelenting pain, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo wrote in her diary shortly before she died: “I joyfully await the exit — and hope never to return.”
Yet return she does — if only briefly — on the Day of the Dead in “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), a Spanish-language opera receiving its Metropolitan Opera premiere this week.
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The opera, with libretto by playwright Nilo Cruz and music by Gabriela Lena Frank, imagines Kahlo’s spectral reunion three years after her death with Diego Rivera, the great Mexican muralist with whom she had a tempestuous romantic relationship.
In a twist on the Orpheus legend, Rivera has grown weary of life without Kahlo and — on the holiday that honors the dead and welcomes the return of their spirits — he summons her from the underworld in the hope they may be eternally reunited.
For mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, who stars as Kahlo, the opera is “a journey of emotions that every human can possess, told through the lens or perspective of iconic humans that many of us admire.”
Joining her in the cast are baritone Carlos Álvarez as Rivera, soprano Gabriella Reyes as Catrina, gatekeeper to the underworld, and countertenor Nils Wanderer as Leonardo, a spirit who impersonates Greta Garbo. Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts six of the seven performances Thursday through June 5, with the May 30 matinee broadcast to cinemas worldwide in HD.
An opera two decades in the making
The idea for the work dates back more than 20 years, when the late Joel Revzen, then director of the Arizona Opera, asked Frank to write an opera about Kahlo.
The collaborators agreed they wanted to avoid conventional approaches and instead leaned into magical realism.
“I wasn’t interested in writing a biopic,” Cruz said. “We had the movie with Salma Hayek … and I’d seen a couple of monologues that had to do with Frida and her life.
“So this whole concept of Diego approaching the end of his life, especially on the Day of the Dead, I thought was interesting,” he said. “I think opera should be bigger than life, so anything that’s mythical makes for a good opera.”
In setting Cruz’s text, Frank said she steered away from melodies and rhythms that would too closely echo traditional Latin music.
“What I wanted to convey instead was something very colorful, something that sounded otherworldly, sometimes ancient,” she said.
“You will hear a lot of instruments you won’t always hear in opera,” Frank said. “The marimba is in almost every scene … It might be covering the clarinet line or the voice and you didn’t realize it was there. But it makes it sound to me as if it’s from Central America.”
In praising the score, New Yorker critic Alex Ross wrote that “the challenge of intermingling biography and myth might have defeated a less adroit composer. One can imagine a score cluttered with Mexican folkloric effects and supernatural noises. Instead, Frank establishes a dreamlike, liminal mood from the start.”
Met reunited ‘Ainadamar’ team
The opera had its COVID-delayed premiere in San Diego in 2022. It was a huge success, and the original production has been performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere.
When the Met decided to stage it, general manager Peter Gelb hired the team that worked on Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar” in 2024 — director and choreographer Deborah Colker and set designer Jon Bausor — to create a new production. Bausor and Wilberth Gonzalez collaborated on the costumes.
“It’s not anything against the original,” Gelb said. “But when you have a work as important and appealing as this there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be more than one production. It’s a sign of its artistic success.”
Finding inspiration in a Kahlo painting
Bausor said his inspiration for the set design was an oil painting by Kahlo titled “Tree of Hope, Remain Strong” that depicts two Fridas. One shows her in an elegant Mexican dress seated on a hospital gurney that rests on cracked earth. Another Frida lies behind her on the gurney, swaddled in sheets with angry red stitches in her back — a reminder of the constant pain she suffered after a 1925 bus collision with a streetcar.
There’s no literal tree in the painting, but the title gave Bausor the idea for one of the centerpieces of his set: a large, blood red tree with twisting branches and roots that resemble arteries of the human body.
“It gave us a symbol for the audience to understand that we weren’t in a real space,” he said. “It’s a link between the living world above with the foliage at the top and the dead world with the roots below,” he said.
The sides and rear of the stage are draped in recycled blue plastic that Bausor calls “a kind of shroud, or blue gauze like you might wrap wounds in.”
Above the stage is a mirror, a nod to the one that was installed under the canopy of Kahlo’s bed to help her paint while she was immobilized from the accident.
And like the Kahlo painting, the stage has cracks from which dancers dressed as skeletons emerge, moving their joints in jerky fashion a bit like break dancers.
Despite its ghostly scenario, the opera has a happy ending of sorts: It grants the lovers the reunion in death that was denied them in reality. Rivera wanted to be cremated and have his ashes mixed with Kahlo’s, but his family refused and buried him in a cemetery.
’It was fascinating to me that he wanted his ashes to be united with hers,” Criuz said, “I thought — this is a story of love after death. So that became the theme of the opera.”