Frida y Diego Suite (2025)
(Frida and Diego Suite)

El último sueño de Frida y Diego — my first opera, with a libretto by my longtime friend and collaborator Nilo Cruz — arrived in the fall of 2022 at San Diego Opera; neither Nilo nor I could have anticipated what would follow within the next few years: performances at the opera houses of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Omaha, Chicago, and the Metropolitan Opera of New York, with more in the works. A story about two people finding their way back to each other has, in some quiet way, found its own path through the world. 

Nilo's conceit is as beguiling as it is precise. It is the Day of the Dead in Mexico City, and Diego Rivera — old, ailing, running out of time — calls for Frida Kahlo, dead three years, to return from Mictlan and help him cross over. Frida resists. The world of the living held for her extraordinary pain, physical and emotional both. But she comes. What unfolds from there is a story of artistic devotion, hard-won forgiveness, love, and — because these are Frida and Diego, after all — a great deal of mischief besides.

The Suite draws from the opera's orchestral heart, organized into five movements.

Se abren los caminos opens in the intimate register of Frida's pain and longing before the full orchestra arrives like dawn — the Day of the Dead unfurling, the roads between worlds beginning to open.

Los calles de México is a dance haunted by Mexican folkloric idioms without surrendering to them — less a traditional dance than the memory of one, the sensation of Frida moving again through streets that were once hers.

Las tres Fridas enters stranger territory: Frida's self-portraits come alive and dance around her in a scene that belongs neither to the world of the dead nor the living, but to the world of art itself — which may be the most sovereign world of all.

Pintar la ausencia is the suite's emotional center of gravity. Diego's frustration takes orchestral form here — the powerlessness of reaching for someone just beyond reach, paint and longing unable to close the distance.

Volver a Mictlan brings the crossing. Frida guides Diego into the underworld in a gesture that asks nothing in return — which is, perhaps, the truest definition of love the story offers.

– Gabriela Lena Frank, 2026