The Metropolitan Opera: El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego

Set on Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) in 1957, three years after Frida Kahlo's death, the opera opens in a cemetery where the aging and ailing muralist Diego Rivera mourns among candles and marigolds, desperately longing to see his deceased wife once more. An old flower vendor reveals herself as La Catrina, the Keeper of the Dead, who descends to Mictlán—the Aztec underworld—to summon Frida back. Frida initially refuses: she has finally found peace in death, free from the physical agony that plagued her life and from the torment of her turbulent marriage. A fellow departed spirit, Leonardo, a young actor and artistic soul, persuades her by appealing to her pride as a painter—offering her the vision of creating 'a new Frida' without suffering. He dresses her in her iconic garments, and she relents. Catrina imposes strict rules: the visit lasts only 24 hours, and Frida may not touch the living—a caress, Catrina warns, will cost her the memory of being free from pain. In a feminist inversion of the Orpheus myth, Frida's motivation is not love for Diego but the desire to paint again.

In Act II, Frida materialises in the world of the living. Diego at first believes he is dreaming; Frida corrects him: 'You're not dreaming me. I am the dead painter.' They wander through Alameda Park among the mingled living and dead. Diego presses for intimacy; Frida deflects, wary both of breaking Catrina's rules and of re-opening old wounds. Their exchange is blunt about the hurt they caused each other—infidelities, betrayal, passionate co-dependence. A beggar woman (Catrina in disguise) interrupts to remind them of earthly suffering; instead of a conventional love duet the couple sings a hymn to their city, united through social conscience. Diego brings Frida home to Casa Azul, which reassembles around them as if by magic. She gravitates to her easel rather than his arms. When she finally embraces him, she is flooded with the 'Memory of Pain'—a hallucinatory moment in which three painted images of herself appear, beckoning both of them into the realm of art. They try to inhabit their paintings permanently, but Frida recognises they cannot live inside art alone. Diego, accepting his mortality, calls upon Mictlantecutli, the Aztec god of the dead, and asks to join Frida in the underworld. Catrina guides him toward death as an Aztec pyramid rises and Mictlantecutli appears. The opera closes with Diego and Frida whispering each other's names in the underworld, eternally reunited—a reversal of the Orpheus myth in which the lovers are joined in death rather than separated by it.

Sources: San Diego Opera website, San Francisco Opera website, Web search results aggregating Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Alta Online, and NPR coverage