La Jornada: With The Last Dream of Frida and Diego, the Met affirms itself as a “space of freedom”

The Spanish baritone Carlos Álvarez, who plays the painter Diego Rivera in The last dream of Frida and Diego, by Gabriela Lena Frank, expressed her pleasure that the Metropolitan Opera (Met) of New York would put on a piece sung in Spanish.

“The stages have to be freely available elements. Freedom of thought and ideas must have an open space on the stage, something that is being seen here,” continued the singer with a career spanning 37 years and who returns to the Met after an absence of 16 years. The Live From the Met series in New York will culminate tomorrow with the transmission of the work via satellite in the National Auditorium, at 11 a.m.

The attention on Kahlo and Rivera is not limited to the opera, since the same American city “practically revolves around these two figures. There is an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and meetings on music and citizenship are held.”

According to Álvarez, “this is a commitment to maintain quality levels regardless of the origin of the artistic manifestation. In this, Mexico and Hispanics are much more consistent.”

These painters were known for their political activism. There is a moment in the opera when Diego and Frida’s social commitment is expressed poetically during a song that goes back to the times of Tenochtitlan.

On another occasion, when talking about the poor, Rivera makes a sign with his hand, a gesture that Álvarez found so powerful, especially in a setting like the Met, and that allowed him “to be here knowing what the political situation of the second Trump administration was, which has once again left Spanish out of the vehicular language, which denigrates Hispanic in general and which becomes a search for what is different to separate it.”

In the meeting with the Mexican press, the singer took the opportunity to offer “apologies for the terrible and embarrassing behavior of a Spanish politician days ago in Mexico, for which I feel truly ashamed. By this I mean that, fortunately, there are very few who think this way.”

Frida and Diego’s last dream It premiered three years ago in San Diego and San Francisco. Faced with the responsibility of interpreting iconic and controversial characters, not only because of their personal relationship, but also because of their capacity for political and social commitment, Álvarez wanted to turn Rivera into a character that could be considered from another point of view, since the work is finally dedicated to telling a love story that happened in real life.

Regarding his interpretation, he noted that “vocality forces one to be absolutely truthful in the way they express love, despair, pain, power, their political and social condition.

“The use of deep voices, both for the role of Frida, sung by mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, and that of Diego, shows that the purpose was to find characters who had strong characters and that this could be demonstrated in their vocality.”

For her part, the Brazilian Deborah Colker, director and choreographer of the work, indicated that Frida and Diego are two icons that “inspired much of my active life since I was a teenager. Their paintings, their lives, their political activism, the way they feel and understand life, and that they come from Mexico, because they are true human beings and Mexican artists, but at the same time universal. They are timeless. They are dead, but they are still alive. They are part of my life and of many lives.

“I knew that it was not a biographical opera, but something very mythical, a dream. I read so many biographies, I went to Mexico to be in the celebrations for the Day of the Dead. I did a lot of research in order to bring all this inspiration to the opera. Although it is not biographical, there is an atmosphere. In the libretto I felt the need to bring to the stage the streets of Mexico, the cemeteries, the altars; that is, three worlds: the real one, the underworld and the artistic one.

“For this I delved into the language of surrealism, to see to what extent Mexico has inspired and how it is connected to everything.”