La Jornada: The stormy marriage of Frida and Diego comes to the New York Opera

New York. Like a macabre scene straight out of one of her vivid canvases, Frida Kahlo holds Diego Rivera in her arms as he dies at the foot of a red tree. Their silhouettes, framed by blue curtains, end an opera dedicated to their turbulent relationship.

Sung in Spanish, Frida and Diego’s last dream plays for the first time at the Metropolitan Opera in New York starting tomorrow, before an international theatrical broadcast on May 30.

The opera, released in 2022, is not a biography, but a “fantasy,” said American composer Gabriela Lena Frank, who worked with Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz.

The story takes place in 1957, three years after Kahlo’s death, in the final hours of Rivera’s life, as he is plagued by remorse for his stormy relationship, his infidelities, the impossibility of having a child with her, and the way he overshadowed his wife’s career.

Their posthumous reunion, a way to “redeem herself,” Cruz said, occurs on the occasion of the Day of the Dead, when Kahlo returns to the world of the living in search of her husband and an opportunity to paint again.

“Deeply Latin history”

“Latinos, you know, we are in a very difficult time right now,” Frank said. “It seems incredible to me that it is precisely now that a cultural institution like the Met Opera is celebrating a deeply Latino history.”

The opera is inspired by Kahlo’s paintings, which were sometimes overshadowed by Rivera’s monumental murals while she was alive.

However, over time her work has become the most expensive in the world made by a woman.

His painting from 1940 The dream (The bed) It reached a record price in the art market for a woman, selling for $54.6 million in 2025.

The embrace of love from The Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Me, Diego and Mr. Xólotl (1949), in which the artist depicted herself carrying her naked husband in her arms, is one of the works that inspired the opera.

Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker created a montage with more than 80 people on stage, inspired by both artists, but especially by Kahlo’s surrealism.

Omnipresent, the dance exalts Lena Frank’s score, recently rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize for another composition: Picaflor: A myth of the future.

In parallel to the opera, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) also exhibits drawings and paintings by Kahlo and Rivera, in dialogue with the opera and in an environment inspired by it.

The intimate characteristics of her work, her relationship with the body and pain, as well as her feminism, have made Frida Kahlo a contemporary icon present in various spaces, including commercial ones, in a phenomenon described as “Fridamania”.