About the work
El último sueño de Frida y Diego is a contemporary Spanish-language opera with music by the American composer Gabriela Lena Frank and a libretto by the Cuban-American, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz. It premiered in 2022 at San Diego Opera, followed by a much-noticed production at San Francisco Opera. The work combines the imagery of the Mexican Día de los Muertos with a poetic meditation on love, death and art, placing the legendary artist couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at its centre.
Plot
Mexico City, 1957: the terminally ill painter Diego Rivera senses his approaching death and yearns desperately for his wife Frida Kahlo, who died three years earlier. In the realm of the dead, on the Day of the Dead, Frida is granted permission by the death figure Catrina to return to the world of the living for a single night. At first she hesitates, for death has released her from a lifetime of pain, but her love for Diego draws her back. In a night full of memories, reproaches, passion and reconciliation, the two meet once more. Frida helps Diego make peace with his own dying and cross the threshold, before she finally returns to the afterlife and receives him there on his last journey.
Cultural significance
As one of the first operas commissioned by a major U.S. opera house and performed entirely in Spanish, El último sueño de Frida y Diego marks an important step for cultural diversity in American music theatre. Gabriela Lena Frank weaves together influences of Latin American music with a contemporary idiom, while Nilo Cruz's libretto distils Mexican mythology and the iconic life stories of Kahlo and Rivera into great poetry. The opera has been celebrated for its colourful staging aesthetic, inspired by folk art, and is regarded as a significant example of how the operatic genre embraces new voices, languages and cultural traditions.