The composer Gabriela Lena Frank first met Frida Kahlo in the pages of a book.
In the late 1970s, Frank’s mother, an immigrant from Peru, brought home an art history series from the free-books shelf at their local library in Berkeley, California. She took care to point out Kahlo to her young, musically gifted daughter, who had just begun wearing hearing aids. Like Frank, Kahlo was of mixed Latin American and European heritage, disabled — the artist navigated health challenges all her life after a bus accident — and a woman in a male-dominated craft.
“In my youth, Diego Rivera” — Kahlo’s muralist husband — “was still the more famous painter,” Frank remembers. “Fridamania happened a little later. But it was really Frida that had a more intimate hold in my imagination.”
A new surge of Fridamania has gripped Chicago, too. In the past year, the Joffrey Ballet and Writers Theatre both presented new works about Kahlo, and the Art Institute hosted “Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris,” its first exploration of Kahlo’s work. Lyric Opera also toured a short, family-friendly opera based on the children’s book “Frida Kahlo and the Bravest Girl in the World” at schools and neighborhood venues last season.
Kahlo arrives on the Lyric mainstage this month when the company presents “El último sueño de Frida y Diego,” with music by Frank to a libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz. “El último sueño” premiered at San Diego Opera in 2022 and has since seen the kind of runaway success rare in contemporary opera. Lyric’s production will be the work’s fifth outing, with a sixth at the Metropolitan Opera in New York this May.
“People want to know more about Frida’s story, and understand it in a different way,” says Alivé Piliado, a curatorial associate at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen who co-curated the Art Institute show.
Frank and Cruz’s opera imagines an encounter between Kahlo and Rivera on Día de los Muertos in 1957 — three years after Kahlo’s death, and weeks before Rivera’s own. According to Frank, the story has “three main planes”: the world of the living, the world of the dead and the world of art. The wooden percussive marimba — a sound Frank describes as “ancient” and inevitable,” and “one of the quintessential instruments of Central America” — unites all of them.
“Everybody knows their story was made of fire. They were constantly breaking up and getting back together. That’s really good drama, but it tends to veer a little bit towards melodrama,” Cruz says. “What if we take these things away, and their love exists in another way — that it’s no longer through the body, but through memory?”
Piliado has noticed the same trend in the Kahlo craze. She grew up in Coyoacán, the same borough of Mexico City as Kahlo’s lifelong family home, Casa Azul. It was ground zero for Fridamania: Piliado came of age around the release of the 2002 “Frida” biopic, starring Salma Hayek, and she remembers buying up a limited-edition Frida line of Converse shoes.
“In Spanish we say, ‘La ves hasta en la sopa’ — like, you even see her in the soup,” she says.
But Piliado notes that Fridamania wouldn’t have happened at all without years of advocacy by other artists and art historians, many of them women. In the 1970s, feminist artists like Magali Lara began to hold Kahlo up as an icon in her own right, untethering her legacy from Rivera’s. Art historian Hayden Herrera’s breakthrough 1983 biography — the basis for the 2002 film — was yet another turning point.
“Most of the research that’s been done of Frida was very biographical. It was very into understanding the complex relationship with Diego and the lovers. But lately, people are looking much more at her painting,” Piliado says. “I think there is a lot more to discuss that we haven’t really discussed yet.”
Frank and Cruz had been matchmade for a Kahlo opera 20 years ago, during the first Fridamania wave. It was, they both note, a different time — not just in Kahlo scholarship but for Latino representation in opera. They encountered some resistance to the notion of an all-Spanish libretto, and the opera floated along for years. Even today, “El último sueño” will be only the second Spanish-language opera presented on Lyric’s main season, after Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas” in 2021. (Plus 2015’s multilingual “Bel Canto” — also to a libretto by Cruz — featured extensive Spanish portions.)
“We weren’t looking at all-brown teams for opera,” Frank says.
In the meantime, Frank and Cruz had gone on to collaborate on more than a dozen projects — like the staggering choral-orchestral “Conquest Requiem,” which the Grant Park Music Festival will present in June.
Cruz was mulling over how to frame the opera when he saw Kahlo’s “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xolotl.” The 1949 painting features Kahlo cradling a naked, infant-like Rivera. In turn, Kahlo is embraced by a feminine Earth figure, who is wrapped in the arms of a still-larger universal being.
To Cruz, Kahlo seemed to be carrying Rivera from an arid landscape “to another world” — a twist on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, oft-adapted in opera. Día de los Muertos, the day the veil between the living and dead drops away, made perfect sense as a dramatic frame.
That also freed up Cruz and Frank to incorporate fictional secondary characters. Catrina, a mischievous “keeper of souls,” negotiates Kahlo’s and Rivera’s reunion but also sets its terms. Also among the dead is Leonardo, an actor and female impersonator desperate to meet his (unfortunately still living) idol, Greta Garbo.
Piliado, the curator, finds “El último sueño’s” Día de los Muertos setting apt. In the recent Art Institute exhibition, Piliado and her colleagues explored the tensions in Kahlo’s relationship with Surrealism, the art movement that emerged in France between the World Wars. She met movement figurehead André Breton when he lectured in Mexico City; Julien Levy, an influential promoter for the Surrealists, hosted Kahlo’s first solo exhibition in New York in 1938.
Still, Kahlo herself found the term and philosophy alienating, says Piliado.
“She said, ‘I don’t paint my dreams. I paint my own reality’ … They’re not the same as European standards of life,” Piliado says. “I think of this understanding that we can feel with the Day of the Dead. You’re so used to understanding life in a nonlinear way — this magic that exists in everyday life.”
Kahlo and Rivera occasionally referenced the holiday in their works. Rivera painted a “Día de los Muertos” fresco in 1924, which remains in Mexico City. Kahlo also often disrupted her self-portraits with memento mori: painting a younger version of herself with a skull face in “Girl with Death Mask” (1938), or placing a small skull in front of her brow in “Pensado en la muerte” (1943).
A pointed reference to Día de los Muertos appears in Kahlo’s 1945 portrait “Sin esperanza,” The painting depicts one of her bedstays, during which her pain was so extreme that she lost her appetite. A funnel full of flesh and dead animals is angled towards her mouth, propped up by her custom easel. A calavera, or sugar skull, balances atop the grotesque heap.
“You can see the life and death ideas connected in it,” Piliado says.
Frank and Cruz hope their opera will give voice to that duality. It’s only brought Frank closer to the artist who first sparked her imagination, all those years ago in California.
“I was on the phone with one of our agents, and just talking about the opera, I started weeping — and I really am not a crier,” Frank says. “I felt like I knew them, through all of this.”
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
If you go
“El último sueño de Frida y Diego” runs March 21 to April 4 at Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 N. Wacker Drive, tickets $55-$375 at lyricopera.org
