Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera have inspired books, films and plays with their evocative paintings and passionate, turbulent relationship. Now, the 20th century Mexican painters are protagonists in an opera.
"We all see elements of this relationship in our own relationships and how we replicate these kinds of toxic elements too," composer Gabriela Lena Frank said ahead of the May 14 opening night at New York's Metropolitan Opera.
"They remind me a little bit of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, you know, they were just brilliant and charismatic and attracted to one another and then they drove each other nuts also."
On a recent morning, she took time between rehearsals for the opera, El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, to visit a companion exhibition of Kahlo and Rivera's work at the nearby Museum of Modern Art, which runs through September.
Frank lingered in front of a striking, surreal painting by Kahlo, where her head is superimposed on the body of a deer shot through with arrows.
"If I had to pick one Frida Kahlo painting that I would look at for the rest of my life, it was always going to be this one," said Frank. "I remember seeing this as a little girl. I was just kind of haunted by it."
Frank had just won the Pulitzer Prize for her orchestral work Picaflor: A future myth, inspired by Andean cosmology.
Joining her on the tour of MoMA's Frida and Diego: The Last Dream — a translation of the opera's Spanish title — was librettist and fellow Pulitzer winner, librettist Nilo Cruz.
The exhibition features paintings and drawings by Kahlo and Rivera, as well as archival photographs, all in an environment created by Jon Bausor, the opera's set and costume designer.
Beverly Adams, the museum's Estrellita Brodsky curator of Latin American art, noted that Rivera was far more famous than Kahlo during their lifetimes.
"In the 1930s, he was the most famous artist in the world," she told Frank and Cruz about the painter who created enormous frescoes. "He was the second person to have a retrospective at MoMA."
But more than seven decades after her death, it's Kahlo who's evolved into an international pop-culture phenomenon. Her floral crown, bleeding heart and unibrow are now ubiquitous on anything from jewelry to coffee mugs and stationery. She's also a celebrated feminist icon.
Frank avoided facile reductions in developing the opera — her first. It all began nearly 20 years ago, when the Arizona Opera approached Frank, who's of Peruvian Chinese and Lithuanian Jewish descent, to write an opera about the pair. She met with Cruz at her publisher's office, to see if he'd be interested in collaborating.
"When Gabriela approached me about the project, I immediately said to her, I'm not interested in writing a biopic on Frida and Diego," the Cuban-American playwright recalled. "I was very resistant because the movie had come out with Salma Hayek, I'd seen several plays, the biographies were out, and so I really wanted to veer away from that."
Then Frank played a piece of music for him inspired by Mexico's Day of the Dead holiday.
"It immediately inspired me," Cruz recalled. "I said, 'this is the entry into their world. How about if Frida is dead, but Diego is dying and he wants her to come back for the Day of the Dead.' And immediately, we both looked at each other. We were..."
Frank jumped in to finish the sentence: "That's it. We got the framework in our very first meeting!" she laughed. "We didn't even know each other. It was like a blind date!"
The two artists became fast friends and worked together on several projects, but it took a while for the Kahlo/Rivera opera to come to fruition. It premiered at the San Diego Opera in 2022, moved to the San Francisco Opera and, earlier this year, the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
The Metropolitan Opera's production, directed by Deborah Colker, is an entirely new one. "It's not biographic. It's not their painting. It's a dream, no?" said the Brazilian artist, who has her own dance company and has worked with Cirque du Soleil.
Her kinetic production features hip-hop popping skeletons and chorus singers wearing death masks. The set and costumes evoke both artists' imagery. "I thought that I needed to bring this surrealism language all the time. It's through the imagination, through dance, through movement," Colker said.
The opera — sung entirely in Spanish — is kind of a reverse Orpheus story. Diego wants Frida to return to the living, but down in the Underworld, Frida remembers the physical and emotional pain she felt when she was alive. They reunite briefly among the living before a final farewell.
Kahlo, who died at the age of 47, had chronic spinal column concerns, contracted polio as a young child, was seriously injured in a bus accident as a teenager and spent the rest of her short life in severe pain.
Her relationship with the much older Rivera was passionate and toxic. They both had numerous affairs, but Kahlo was traumatized by Rivera's relationship with her younger sister Cristina, causing a brief separation.
"She's convinced to come back because she actually wants to see her art and she wants to see her house and she wants to visit the world again, you know?" said mezzo soprano Isabel Leonard, who not only sings the part of Frida, but also dances.
"She loved the world and she was in love with the colors of her home and the animals and the market. She had such passion, I think, for all of those things, including for Diego."
Cruz's libretto constantly references color and, for Frank, orchestral color is important, too.
"There are instruments that are featured that you don't normally hear featured," said the composer. "One is the marimba, which is the quintessential instrument of Central America. That's my main tribute to Mexican culture, the inclusion of this magnificent instrument."
Spanish baritone Carlos Álvarez plays Diego Rivera. "I don't judge Diego as a character, as a person, I try to empathize with him," said the singer. The reunion with Frida is, to say the least, bittersweet.
"They get together, they separate, they cannot touch each other," Álvarez said. "That's the only rule, not breakable. Death needs to have a distance with life. And then only when they touch each other is when Diego dies."
Adams, the MoMA curator, says the lives and art of Rivera and Kahlo remain compelling because they were especially vibrant.
"These are people who lived their lives to the fullest," she said. "They felt all the pain and all the pleasure and they made every bit of their lives count. And that's something I think we can see in their pictures and know from their stories."
At the end of the opera, Frida and Diego stand center stage. Blossoms fall from above and the chorus sings that their art is eternal. "This is the last dream of Frida and Diego," said librettist Cruz. "And then you wonder at the beginning, whose dream is it? Is it his dream? Is it her dream? Or are we all dreaming this dream when we come see this opera?"
Audiences can see El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego at the Met through June 5. It will be available live in HD on Saturday, May 30 in theaters across the U.S. and internationally.
The broadcast and digital versions of this story were edited by Olivia Hampton.
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