Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Sing Themselves to Death in an Opera at the Met Inspired by Greek Mythology and Mexican Magical Realism

A new production of the all-Spanish opera “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” takes the stage in New York City this week, while a partner exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art explores the art behind the opera

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

May 14, 2026 4:23 p.m.

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Frida Kahlo is rising from the dead at the Metropolitan Opera. The New York City theater is staging a new production of El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, or The Last Dream of Frida and Diego, a magical-realist opera that imagines an afterlife encounter between the iconic Mexican painter and her husband, artist Diego Rivera.

The opera is “a journey of emotions that every human can possess, told through the lens or perspective of iconic humans that many of us admire,” mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, who plays Kahlo, tells the Associated Press’ Mike Silverman.

El Último Sueño, scored by composer Gabriela Lena Frank and written in Spanish by playwright Nilo Cruz, premiered in San Diego in 2022. The next year, it had a run in San Francisco, where the New Yorker’s Alex Ross praised the “visually seductive” production’s “dreamlike, liminal mood.” Now, the opera is onstage at the Met—with new sets and costumes designed by Jon Bausor.

The opera is set in Mexico City, Kahlo’s hometown. There, she painted the colorful, bold self-portraits that defined her career; she was in a bus crash that would injure her body for life; and she met Rivera, the progressive muralist with whom she shared a tumultuous, painful marriage.

“They remind me a little bit of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, you know?” Frank tells Morning Edition’s Jeff Lunden. “They were just brilliant and charismatic and attracted to one another and then they drove each other nuts also.”

When El Último Sueño begins, it’s Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Kahlo is dead and Rivera—played by baritone Carlos Álvarez—misses her. The story proceeds as a reversal of the Orpheus and Euridice myth. In the Greek tale, Orpheus descends into Hades to bring back his lover Euridice. But in El Último Sueño, Rivera summons the spirit of his deceased wife from the underworld.

“This whole concept of Diego approaching the end of his life, especially on the Day of the Dead, I thought was interesting,” Cruz tells the AP. “I think opera should be bigger than life, so anything that’s mythical makes for a good opera.”

El Último Sueño shows Kahlo and Rivera reconnecting and reminiscing, then Kahlo bringing Rivera back with her to the underworld. Director Deborah Colker tells Morning Edition, “It’s not biographic. It’s not their painting. It’s a dream, no?”

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Frank tells the Art Newspaper’s Elena Goukassian that she composed El Último Sueño over the span of a decade. Though she’d long been familiar with Kahlo as an artist, it was the late conductor Joel Revzen who catalyzed El Último Sueño. Frank tells the Art Newspaper that Revzen “caught wind of some of my art songs and felt I had an opera in me.” The score she came up with is “a magically spooky texture of xylophone, marimba, celesta and harp,” per the New Yorker.

While there are trumpeted hints of mariachi, most of Frank’s music is abstract, focused on “the dream world of the living, the dead and art,” she tells the Art Newspaper. “I wanted it to sound ancient and old, beauty coalescing with dissonance.”

As for the sets and costumes, they “go deep into Frida’s paintings,” Frank tells the Art Newspaper. “Into her broken body, into her veins. It’s visually very full of mystery.”

Bausor tells the AP that he was moved by Kahlo’s 1946 painting Tree of Hope, Remain Strong, which she made around the time she had spinal surgery. It depicts two Kahlos: One, elegantly dressed, sits on the edge of a hospital bed, and another lies in the bed, naked, with bleeding cuts in her back. The artwork inspired one of Bausor’s stage centerpieces: a large, twisting tree the color of blood, with roots that resemble veins.

“It gave us a symbol for the audience to understand that we weren’t in a real space,” Bausor tells the AP. “It’s a link between the living world above with the foliage at the top and the dead world with the roots below.”

Bausor also co-curated a collaborative museum exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called “Frida and Diego: The Last Dream,” which contains pieces by both artists and is on view through September 12.

Beverly Adams, MoMA’s curator of Latin American art, co-curated the “Frida and Diego” show. She tells the Art Newspaper that the exhibition and the opera involve “works of art inside other works of art.”

“The public seems entranced by it all,” Adams says of the exhibition. “People are lingering, and they seem in awe. It’s a visual extravaganza.”

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Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.