El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego 🇲🇽
On Day of the Dead, Frida visits Diego for one more night
New Metropolitan Opera Production
In Spanish with English, German, or Spanish Met Titles
Starring Isabel Leonard, Carlos Álvarez, Gabriella Reyes 🇦🇷 🇪🇸 🇳🇮
Composer Gabriela Lena Frank 🪶 🇵🇪
Librettist Nilo Cruz 🇨🇺
Director/Choreographer Deborah Colker 🇧🇷
Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center
May 14 – June 5
$33+
Heavy Hitter Artists
Isabel Leonard is a multiple Grammy-winning American mezzo-soprano with Argentine roots. She is a Met Opera regular. 🇦🇷
Carlos Álvarez is a Spanish baritone known for singing Verdi, Spanish zarzuela and contemporary opera. 🇪🇸
Gabriella Reyes is an American lyric soprano with Nicaraguan roots. She is known for singing Rosalba in “Florencia en el Amazonas” and Mimì in the classic “La Bohème.” She came up through the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. 🇳🇮
Gabriela Lena Frank, the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Music winner, is an American pianist and composer of Indigenous Peruvian, Chinese, Lithuanian, and Jewish descent. Though born with profound hearing loss, she is one of today’s hot Latin composers. She has also won a Latin Grammy and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Washington Post named her one of the most significant women composers in history. 🪶 🇵🇪
Nilo Cruz is an American Pulitzer Prize for Drama winner born in Matanzas, Cuba; the birthplace of rumba and danzón, Cuba’s national dance. He was the first Latino playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He won it for “Anna in the Tropics.” His collaboration with the composer Frank evolved over 15 years into “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego.” He is one of America’s greatest living playwrights.
Deborah Colker is a Brazilian-born Jewish Russian choreographer and director. She was the first woman to choreograph for Cirque du Soleil, and choreographed the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics opening ceremony with 6,000 performers. She has also choreographed opening parade performances for some Rio Carnival’s most famous samba schools. Her Met debut was directing Florencia en el Amazonas. She is the first Brazilian to direct for the Met Opera.
A Great Love Story
The title means “the last dream of Frida and Diego.” To English-speakers it reads like “the ultimate dream of Frida and Diego.” It is both.
As far as I am concerned, this story actually happened. Frida and Diego are one of the world’s great love stories. They fought like cats and dogs, but truly loved each other. If you ever had a great love, even if it was destructive at times, it’s the one that will fill your final memories. Diego would have thought of her on Day of the Dead, and if anyone could crossover, it would be Frida.
In this story, Diego, facing his own pending death, visits an cemetery on Day of the Dead, and thinks of Frida. There, he encounters La Catrina, Queen of the Dead.
In Mictlán, the Aztec underworld, Catrina calls Frida to visit Diego. She doesn’t want to go, but meets Leonardo, a young actor who wants to go back as Greta Garbo to fulfill a fan’s dreams. This helps Frida decide to go and she helps Leonardo go too. But Catrina sets the condition that if Frida touches the living, all her pain will return.
They find themselves in Mexico’s City Alameda Park. Frida is pain free. They go to their two-part home Caza Azul. Diego asks Frida to paint, but as a soul, she cannot see her primary subject ~ herself. She suddenly embraces Diego and all her life’s pain comes back. To distract her from it, Diego encourages Frida to paint and her works come to life on stage.
At dawn, Frida has to go back. Diego begs the gods to take him with her. Catrina says only God decides when it’s our time to go. Frida pleads, and Diego’s journey begins.
Catrina calls her husband Mictlantecutli to take Diego away. Reunited in death, Frida and Diego whisper to each other. Their dream has come true.
This opera is part of a celebration of Mexican culture at the Metropolitan Opera with a companion exhibition, “Frida and Diego” The Last Dream” at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art.
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
Both are world-renowned Mexican artists.
In their time, Diego was more famous, but today Frida is a global icon of Mexico, strong Latinas, Indigenous and Mestiza identity, disability, LGBTQ+ rights, anti-Imperialism, and a fashion icon.
Her art was very surreal and very personal. She was badly injured in a bus accident which caused a lifetime of pain that often kept her in bed, but she was unstoppable. If she needed to do something, she had the bed carried around.
Diego Rivera is Mexico’s most famous muralist. By the way, the Whitney Museum of American Art said that the biggest influence on American art wasn’t the Europeans. It was the Mexican muralists.
Rivera played a role in popularizing Mexico’s Day of the Dead tradition, by painting Frida and La Calavera Catrina (Queen of the Dead) into his famous mural “Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central” (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park).
Day of the Dead
Day of the Dead is a pan-Latin tradition, but Mexico’s tradition is world-famous. The tradition’s skull imagery is really cool.
Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos) is a Mexican celebration of family. We invite deceased family members to visit by building ofrendas (altars) with a family photo and perhaps some food, drink, and things they liked in life. On the Day of the Dead, we tend family graves.
Traditional Mexican culture considers death to be reality, and life is just a dream. The underworld is not the Christian Hell. It’s just where dead people go. By tradition, on Day of the Dead, the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead loosen. If you’re invited, you can visit your family.
In Mexico’s Day of the Dead tradition, you live on (in the underworld) as long as someone remembers you. By that standard, the love of Frida and Diego will live forever.