Fridamania is underway in New York with multiple Kahlo-focused cultural events. Rizzoli released an art-book about Frida Kahlo’s new museum in Mexico City, situated in her childhood home, authored by her grandniece and great-grandnieces. MoMA presents a compact but impactful exhibition featuring works by Kahlo and her longtime partner Diego Rivera. The largest event is a new Metropolitan Opera production, El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, with music by Gabriela Lena Frank and libretto by Nilo Cruz, opening 14 May. The set and costume designer Jon Bausor also co-curated the MoMA exhibition. The opera took more than a decade to develop, with Frank crediting conductor Joel Revzen for recognizing her opera potential and Cruz for avoiding a biopic approach.
"There, a much-anticipated new production of El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego -with music by Gabriela Lena Frank and libretto by Nilo Cruz, both Pulitzer Prize winners-opens on 14 May. In a unique twist, the opera's set and costume designer, Jon Bausor, also co-curated the MoMA exhibition (in concert with the curator Beverly Adams, who specialises in Latin American art)."
"El Último Sueño was already more than a decade in the making by the time it premiered in San Diego in 2022. "My mom introduced Frida Kahlo's artwork to me when I was five years old, but the idea of writing an opera about her didn't originate with me," Frank tells The Art Newspaper. For that, she credits the late conductor Joel Revzen, the artistic director of Arizona Opera in the early 2000s, who "caught wind of some of my art songs and felt I had an opera in me"."
"After the two met, they started looking for a librettist and found Cruz, who had recently won a Pulitzer. "He stood out," Frank says. "He seemed like a lovely human being, and one thing he said was he didn't want to do a biopic. He wanted to illuminate new corners of Frida's life.""
"These new corners foreground grand emotion over historical accuracy and linear time-as is customary in opera. El Último Sueño tells the story of Kahlo's spirit (sung in the Me"
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