Here’s one opera that won’t be playing at the Melania Trump Opera House: El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, libretto by Nilo Cruz and music by Gabriela Lena Frank. The Metropolitan Opera will present a production in May, featuring Isabel Leonard as Frida and Carlos Álvarez as Diego.
The opera focuses on Frida Kahlo, a famous Mexican painter who came to the United States on a tourist visa along with her husband Diego Rivera. Also an artist, Rivera painted murals in Detroit, New York and San Francisco.
This is not a world première nor an American première, as this opera was first performed by the San Diego Opera in 2022. Nor is it even the first production this year, as the Lyric Opera of Chicago has a run scheduled to start in March. But the Met production will be the first time this composer will be heard at that opera house.
American composer Gabriela Lena Frank makes her Met debut with her first opera, a magical-realist portrait of Mexico’s painterly power couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with libretto by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Nilo Cruz. Fashioned as a reversal of the Orpheus and Euridice myth, the story depicts Frida, sung by leading mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, leaving the underworld on the Day of the Dead and reuniting with Diego, portrayed by baritone Carlos Álvarez. The famously feuding pair briefly relive their tumultuous love, embracing both the passion and the pain before bidding the land of the living a final farewell. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Met premiere of Frank’s opera, a “confident, richly imagined score” (The New Yorker) that “bursts with color and fresh individuality” (Los Angeles Times). The vibrant new production, taking enthusiastic inspiration from Frida and Diego’s paintings, is directed and choreographed by Deborah Colker, following her remarkable 2024 debut staging of Ainadamar.
Here’s a brief excerpt from the Los Angeles Opera production from the 2023/2024 season:
The Metropolitan Opera production will run from May 14 to June 5. Tickets start at $35 as of today. I found out about this opera because of a YouTube ad about Met productions coming to a movie theater near you. And sure enough, the Met notes “that video cameras will be in operation during the May 26 and May 30 performances as part of the Met’s Live in HD series of cinema transmissions.”
As for the Melania Trump Opera House, maybe they could do screenings of Sieg des Glaubens and Der Triumph des Willens.
