Yesterday afternoon I returned to the War Memorial Opera House for my second encounter with the San Francisco Opera production of Gabriela Lena Frank’s El último sueño de Frida y Diego (the last dream of Frida [Kahlo] and Diego [Rivera]). This opera is very much a major undertaking, and I realized that this was just as much the case for members of the audience as it was for everyone involved in the production. To be more specific, I realized that, when I saw this opera for the first time a little over a week ago, I found myself still saturated with details of the first act when it came time for me to take in the second. This second time around my memories of the first act were salient enough that I could devote more attention to the second act; and, as a result, I left the Opera House with a more satisfied account of the entire plot line.
Nevertheless, I also came away with a few new perspectives on the first act. The most important of these involved the selection of those that would be allowed to visit the world of the living during the Day of the Dead. Those visitors were selected by La Catrina (soprano Yaritza Véliz), who serves as the Keeper of the Dead. The “selection scene” left me with the impression that Catrina was basically a bureaucrat, presiding over an organization that was not that different from any major corporation! I was also struck by how the set for the opening scene of the first act, the cemetery where Frida is buried, amounted to a vast array of red flowers. The transition to the following scene, which takes place in Mictlán (the Aztec underworld), was realized by elevating that entire landscape of flowers, making for a convincing account that we, the viewers, were now in the underworld!
Frida (Daniela Mack) appears to Diego (Alfredo Daza) while he is struggling to begin a mural (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of San Francisco Opera)
While the first act is structured around a balanced account of the realm of the living and the realm of the dead, the second act tends to wander through its share of the narrative, leaving a variety of different settings (not always congruous) in its wake. Yes, the rising of the curtain provides a jaw-dropping account of Diego (baritone Alfredo Daza) facing an empty wall (canvas?), making a few gestures on how to begin a mural but ultimately rejecting all of them. Most of the act, however, is primarily dialogue between him and Frida (mezzo Daniela Mack), with particular attention to Catrina’s rule that the living are not allowed to touch the dead. (Bureaucracy strikes again!)
Of course, it is inevitable that they do touch. However, it struck me that this moment never seemed to carry the impact of its parallel in operatic settings of the Orpheus myth. Instead, Diego makes it clear that he wishes to follow Frida; and Catrina “makes it so” (as we used to see on Star Trek). Like Romeo and Juliet, the protagonists are “united in death;” but that union comes across with the same matter-of-factness found in the first act’s “selection scene.”
To be fair, if the narrative did not always register with me on the best of terms, there is no doubt that I was blown away by the music. Frank brought a well-trained ear to her score, particularly in the rich diversity of sonorities from the large ensemble in the orchestra pit; and conductor Roberto Kalb, making his SFO debut, knew how to make all of those sonorities register with the attentive listener. Furthermore, whether it involved what was being sung or what the setting was for the singing, the score itself consistently provided sonorities conducive to the progress of the narrative. Like many of the operas of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, there are no end of episodes in which the music “does all the talking;” and I suspect that I would be as drawn to an audio recording of Frank’s music as I have been to the works of those “two Richards.”
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