ETERNAL EMBRACE. FRIDA AND DIEGO, MET OPERA HOUSE

 Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, art history’s greatest couple, find lasting love in the underworld in composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s captivating opera El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, set to a libretto by Nilo Cruz. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Met premiere of this beguiling story of love and death. By Matt Dobkin

In real life, Mexican artist Diego Rivera was denied his final wish: to be cremated and his ashes placed with those of Frida Kahlo, his third of four wives and the fellow artist with whom he would forever be linked. 

When Rivera died in 1957, at the age of 70, his family (and presumably his fourth and final wife) ignored his stated request on so-called religious grounds, and he was given a grand public funeral and burial in a special tomb in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men in Mexico City’s largest cemetery.

In the opera El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, however, which has its Met premiere on May 14, Rivera at last gets his wish, reuniting in the underworld with Frida on Mexico’s Day of the Dead.

“That was something that really stayed with me as I did my research,” says librettist Nilo Cruz. “Diego, at the end of his life, with that wish to be infused with his beloved.”..

https://www.metopera.org/discover/articles/eternal-embrace/