Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 10 - El último sueño de Frida y Diego

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 20 In a sonic landscape that creates a permeable passage between the heaviness of the past and present, Frida ultimately accepts the opportunity to return to the living. Importantly, this decision is not primarily made to accompany Diego through death, but rather to take up the challenge her fellow underworld artist Leonardo voices: to “paint a new Frida without anguish, without indifference, without pain.” This opera reanimates the power of art as a force that makes the weight of the world worth carrying. Frank’s long-time association with Nilo Cruz, Cuban- American playwright and librettist who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Anna in the Tropics , has brought the organic story-telling aspect of her music to the forefront. They met in 2007 and collaborated on several smaller scale works (including the song cycle La centinela y la paloma , 2010; Journey of the Shadow , 2013; and Las cinco lunas de Lorca, 2016) before Conquest Requiem (2017), an extended work for chorus with two soloists and orchestra. Conquest can be seen as a close relative to El último sueño (2022). The requiem interweaves movements from the Latin Mass for the dead with texts in Latin, Spanish, and Nahuatl (an indigenous Aztec language of central Mexico). Conquest Requiem was inspired by the true story of Malinche (a Nahua woman from the Gulf Coast of Mexico, enslaved by the Spaniards from a young age). She was the consort of conquistador Hernán Cortés and, given Malinche’s gift with languages, she also became an interpreter who was both implicated in (and victimized by) the colonial conquest of the Aztec Empire by the Spanish. This story about the forceful European entrance to the Americas is central to modern history yet in this work it is not told from the usual Spanish/European viewpoint. With two soloists, soprano Malinche and baritone Martín Cortés (Malinche’s son with Hernán Cortés), a large part of the narrative is sung in Nahuatl from the vantage point of the conquered. The requiem is a study of blending the western history of Europe (in the Catholic mass and use of Latin and Spanish languages) with a less familiar indigenous voice of the Americas. In the dynamics between the paired mezzo- soprano and baritone central characters (Malinche and Martín, Frida and Diego), the use of multiple languages and vibrant orchestration illuminate the larger philosophical themes of legacy and cultural representation in Latin American stories. Conquest Requiem illustrates other central features of Frank’s music that figure prominently in El último sueño de Frida y Diego . The seven-movement work features the musical transition between life and death, themes that encompass our behavior on earth and the passage into the beyond. This borderland between the Frida Kahlo’s works come to vivid life on the stage. Corey weaver / San Francisco Opera