Sawt Falasteen - Fraught marriage of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at heart of dreamy opera

Sung in Spanish, "Frida and Diego: The Last Dream" is being staged for the first time at New York's Metropolitan Opera starting Thursday, before an international cinema broadcast May 30.

The 2022 opera is not a biopic, but a "fantasy," said American composer Gabriela Lena Frank, who worked with Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz.

The story is set in 1957, three years after Kahlo's death, in the final hours of Rivera's life -- as he is haunted by regrets about their stormy relationship, his infidelities, their inability to have a child together, and how he overshadowed his wife's career while she was still alive.

Their posthumous reunion -- a way to find "redemption," Cruz said -- happens on the occasion of Dia de los Muertos, Mexico's celebration of the dead, when Kahlo seeks her husband in the world of the living and a chance to paint again.

"Latinos, you know, we're in a very difficult moment right now," Frank said. "It's incredible to me that this is when a cultural institution like the Met Opera is celebrating a deeply Latino story."

The opera draws visual inspiration from Kahlo's paintings, which were sometimes overshadowed by Rivera's monumental murals while she was alive but have now made her work the most expensive art made by a woman in the world.

Her 1940 painting "The dream (The bed)" set the record for the price of a woman's painting, selling for $54.6 million in 2025.

In tandem with the opera, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is also showcasing Kahlo and Rivera's drawings and paintings, in dialogue and in a setting inspired by the opera.

O.Farraj--SF-PST