Met gives El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego its company premiere

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company's music director, conducts six of the seven performances, the first on Thursday. The May 30 matinee goes to cinemas worldwide in HD. Isabel Leonard sings Kahlo and Carlos Álvarez sings Diego Rivera. Gabriella Reyes sings Catrina, the gatekeeper to the underworld, and Nils Wanderer sings Leonardo, a spirit who impersonates Greta Garbo.

A new production, two decades in the making

Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, hired director and choreographer Deborah Colker and set designer Jon Bausor, who worked on the company's 2024 Ainadamar, to create the new production. Bausor and Wilberth Gonzalez collaborated on the costumes. Bausor said Kahlo's painting Tree of Hope, Remain Strong inspired a blood red tree whose branches and roots resemble arteries, linking the living world above to the dead world below. "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."

A libretto, not a biopic

Nilo Cruz wrote the libretto and said he was not interested in writing a biopic. The opera is set on the Day of the Dead in 1957, three years after Kahlo's death. In a twist on the Orpheus myth, Diego, weary of life without her, summons Frida from the underworld. She rises from Mictlán, the Aztec underworld, to retrieve him from the living, and weighs whether returning is worth the pain.

Gabriela Lena Frank composed the score. She 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. Frank said the marimba is in almost every scene and can cover the clarinet line or the voice. The work is sung in Spanish. Frank's score also calls for mariachi trumpets alongside the orchestra.

From San Diego to the Met

The idea dates back more than 20 years, when the late Joel Revzen, then director of Arizona Opera, asked Frank to write an opera about Kahlo. The work had its COVID-delayed premiere in San Diego in 2022 and was a huge success, before traveling to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere. Americas Quarterly praised the set and the score but called the storyline "tenuous and slow at its best and utterly confusing at its worst." The New Yorker's Alex Ross wrote that "the challenge of intermingling biography and myth might have defeated a less adroit composer."

A MoMA exhibition alongside

Frida and Diego: The Last Dream opened at MoMA on 21 March and runs through 12 September 2026, OperaWire reported. The exhibition presents works from MoMA's permanent collection: six paintings and a drawing by Kahlo, over a dozen works by Rivera, and photographic portraits of both artists by photographers including Lola Álvarez Bravo and Leo Matiz. MoMA invited Bausor to create a theatrical installation framing the artworks, drawing on his designs and the visual language of Kahlo and Rivera.

Hyperallergic's reviewer wrote that MoMA was taking the cue from a San Francisco critic who suggested in 2023 that the opera's tableaux belonged in a museum. The installation puts a miniature set model in the lobby and runs a short promotional video featuring the production team. It places a wooden bed frame and a ceiling mirror in the galleries to evoke Kahlo's confinement after her surgeries. The two institutions bill it as a "first-of-its-kind collaboration."