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

21 | Lyric Opera of Chicago living and the dead is the site of the opera’s true setting, the locus of Frida’s mission to help her earthbound widower, Diego, peaceably pass into the afterlife. An important role in the opera is Catrina, the Keeper of the Dead, who summons Frida to return to Earth. Written for high soprano, the trickster-like character mirrors the dual nature of Malinche, the named soprano soloist in the requiem whose alliance with Hernán Cortés opened the path to exploration and collaborative beginnings as well as to exploitation and devastating ruin. The choral writing in both large works helps bind each story together as the chorus creates a sonic landscape delineating life on Earth and the existence beyond. The sound worlds of both earthly life and the imagined afterlife come alive especially through one important signature of Frank’s orchestral style, her expanded virtuosic writing for percussion. In the two compositions, she constructs innovative soundscapes through marimbas, xylophones, tubular bells, cymbals, triangles, tamtam, snare drum, and various other instruments specific to each work. The requiem adds the low wood block, thunder sheet, and bass drum; the opera includes high wood block, rainstick, handbells, small nipple gong, mark tree, and celesta. With this opera, Frank adds an important work and voice to an arena in opera that is only recently getting attention. Her combination of language, Latin American history, and stories told from lesser-known vantage points are bringing experiences that have been hidden in the shadows into better visibility. Most seasoned opera-goers are not accustomed to hearing operas in Spanish — this production is just the second on Lyric’s stage — or even to seeing stories about the Latin American diasporic experiences, though Spain (and especially Seville) were popular settings for operas ranging from the late 18th century (Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni ) and into the early 19th century with Beethoven’s Fidelio (1814) and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (1816). Later in the 19th century are operas by Verdi ( Ernani , Il trovatore , La forza del destino , and Don Carlos ), and — most famously — Bizet’s Carmen , among others. Frank’s opera joins a growing number of productions that are sung in Spanish and reflect elements of a diasporic culture that goes beyond an imagined exoticized locale. An early start to this tradition extends back to Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Gomes, who trained in Italy and wrote eight operas in different languages (Portuguese and Italian), most famously Il Guarany (1870). Manuel de Falla, born in Spain, wrote zarzuelas and operas in Spanish ( La vida breve , 1905). While this is a music history still being written, audiences in recent decades have experienced a newer group of operas sung in Spanish that showcase Latin diasporic stories, exemplified perhaps most prominently in Daniel Catán’s 1996 Florencia en el Amazonas (with a libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain), a vivid work that incorporates Gabriel García Márquez’s magic realism. Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar (In Arabic, “Fountain of Tears”) was composed in 2003 (revised in 2005) and has a libretto by David Henry Hwang that was translated from English into Spanish by Golijov. An “opera in three images,” the extension of “real time” showcased in Márquez’s magical realism applies to Ainadamar ; in it, the story of Federico García Lorca is told in a series of flashbacks by his muse, the actress Margarita Xirgu, as time in the opera moves between the past, the present, and the moment before her death. Though the musical languages of Florencia , Ainadamar , and El último sueño are very different, the three operas in Spanish present diasporic stories that encompass Spain and Latin America — Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay — in ways that move across time, language, and history. With a keen sense of their compositional voices, Frank and Cruz have sharpened the vanguard of what opera can do and say today. Through Mexican folklore of the Day of the Dead and the lives of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, we are given a sophisticated collage, a new vision of history being represented on the opera stage with care, nuance, and power. Naomi André is the David G. Frey Distinguished Professor in Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement and other projects examining opera and representation. This opera reanimates the power of art as a force that makes the weight of the world worth carrying.