Frida’s Dreams (2025)

Composer note
The string quartet has long been a home for me, a comfortable sonic terrain. In my youth, I came to it first through violin — public school lessons, kiddie ensemble rehearsals, then later, as a pianist, long afternoons of chamber music with string majors at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. I composed several quartets during those formative years, and the form became one of my most personal formats for exploring my mixed-race Latin American heritage.

When Brooklyn Rider approached me with a commission, I had just emerged from the deep waters of my first opera, El último sueño de Frida y Diego, created in collaboration with the brilliant Cuban-American librettist Nilo Cruz. The opera centers on a reimagined Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead), where Frida Kahlo’s spirit returns to visit Diego Rivera, her sometime husband, her burden, her beloved. She eventually guides him across to the underworld. It is a surreal meditation on love, pain, artistry, and release.

Frida’s Dreams is a distillation and reinvention of that larger work. Knowing the theatricality, charisma, and nuance of Brooklyn Rider’s playing, I envisioned a chamber version not as an arrangement, but as a re-dreaming. Each of its nine movements trace a scene from the opera’s spirit-world narrative:

I. Se abren los caminos (The opening of the roads)
Twilight falls on a cemetery at the edge of Mexico City. Bells toll. Marigolds and candlelight flicker as villagers await the return of departed souls.

II. El llamado (The call)
In the underworld, Catrina, regal keeper of souls, summons a reluctant Frida and tells her Diego is calling her from the world of the living.

III. El mundo (The world)
Alone and bitter, Frida resists the idea of returning. The world, to her, was agony: “Wounds, anguish, wires, thorns, needles…”

IV. Sin ti (Without you)
A chorus of the dead taunts her: “Your little fatty is a navigator without stars… a dog without its master…”

V. Vistiendo la ilusión (Dressing the illusion)
A caravan of souls prepares for their return to the land of the living, dressing themselves from trunks of clothes in the vivid colors of life.

VI. Pintar la ausencia (To paint the absence)
Diego, alive and painting, struggles with a mural. Behind the canvas, the chorus asks: “Diego Rivera, what to paint? Women, romances, history, revolution…” Frida appears, uneasy.

VII. Entra la mirada (Enter the gaze)
At home in the Casa Azul, Frida realizes she can no longer paint: “God! How do I paint my absence! I have forgotten how to seize an image.”

VIII. Invitación (Invitation)
Three Fridas — figures from her own self-portraits — appear: “Come to the canvas… You will live in a painting.”

IX. Levitación (Levitation)
As the Day of the Dead concludes, spirits gather before an enormous Aztec pyramid and the god Mictlantecuhtli. The chorus, Frida, Diego, and Catrina sing: “Life is brief, but the light will follow the strokes of your paintbrush… for an eternity.”

There is no singing in this piece, but the quartet breathes for the voices. It paints absence, defiance, and levitation. It remembers.

To write this work was to continue a conversation I began long ago with Frida and my own ghosts. Frida’s Dreams is not an attempt to narrate or contain the iconic painter, whose life has often been mythologized and commodified. Rather, it is an offering towards the strength she possessed to carry wounds with color, fire, and love.

— Gabriela Lena Frank