A magical world premiere at San Diego Opera imagines Frida Kahlo reuniting with her husband, Diego Rivera, from beyond the grave; composer Ethel Smyth’s 1906 work, in a fusty revival at Houston Grand Opera, depicts English villagers who plunder shipwrecks and kill the survivors.
Guadalupe Paz and Alfredo Daza
PHOTO: KARLI CADEL
By Heidi Waleson
San Diego.
Opera is an ideal medium for fusing magic and reality, and “El último sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), which had its world premiere at the San Diego Opera on Saturday, does just that with sensitivity and charm. Composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz have created a twist on the Orpheus and Eurydice story, this time in Spanish, set on the Mexican holiday El Día de los Muertos, and featuring Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the two great Mexican painters whose tempestuous romantic partnership ended only with Frida’s death in 1954. Or didn’t end: The opera opens in 1957 with Diego begging Frida to return, a possibility on this day in November when the border between worlds is opened, and the souls of the departed can rejoin their loved ones for 24 hours.
There’s no Halloween terror or mourning gloom to the piece. Like the holiday, it is about love, remembering and forgiveness. And comedy: Catrina, Keeper of the Dead, who controls the passage between worlds, is funny. As in the traditional Orpheus story, art is the passport across the border. Frida, who remembers only the physical and emotional pain of her life—she was profoundly injured in a tram accident and her two marriages to Diego were laced with infidelity—doesn’t want to go but changes her mind at the prospect of being able to paint once more. Yet Mr. Cruz’s poignant libretto keeps us in the realm of dreams rather than nightmares. Even the moment that Frida feels pain again—when, disobeying Catrina’s command to keep her distance, she embraces Diego—is brief.
Ms. Frank’s alluring music also shuttles eloquently between the worlds. After the somber opening scene as Diego and others visit shrines to their dead, the textures in the underworld, led by the cackling Catrina, are brighter and livelier. The chorus of departed souls teases Frida, turning the words “sin ti” (without you) into polyphonic playfulness. When Diego and Frida reunite in the world of the living, the rhythms dance and so does Frida. Instrumental choices are potent: The celesta and piccolo phrase that accompanies Frida’s impassioned first aria about her life of pain suggests haunting, distant memories. Tellingly, that orchestral color returns in the final scene, as Frida accompanies the dying Diego on his own journey to the underworld. Like the libretto, the music evokes a magical atmosphere of dreams.
Mezzo Guadalupe Paz was a passionate Frida; as Diego, baritone Alfredo Daza was touching as a man nearing his end. As Catrina, soprano Maria Katzarava was impressive in the melismas and cackles of the evening’s most arresting vocal music. Countertenor Key’mon W. Murrah was affecting as Leonardo, a departed soul who returns to the world of the living for the thrill of being an actor again—he plays Greta Garbo for a devoted fan. Roberto Kalb’s conducting had both clarity and richness.
The striking production was central to the opera’s impact. Set designer Jorge Ballina and lighting designer Victor Zapatero conjured up an enchanting, artistic Mexico: The opening scene was staged on a tiered Día de los Muertos altar, banked with marigolds and candles that flew upward to hover over the underworld. Later, one of Rivera’s murals came to life inside a giant picture frame, and Frida and Diego visited Frida’s house, Casa Azul, furnished with cutout elements from her paintings—a bed, a shelf, a garden. Eloise Kazan’s costumes enhanced the effect. In the underworld, they matched the orange hues of the holiday marigolds in a variety of historical styles—there was even an armored soldier. When the dead visited the living, they changed into a wider array of colors, and Frida donned her familiar Tehuana-inspired dress and flower crown. Catrina’s skeleton-festooned regalia reflected depictions of pre-Columbian gods. Against this background of riotous color and detail, Lorena Maza’s minimal direction made the scenes into tableaux, static rather than active. The production goes to the San Francisco Opera, a co-commissioner, with a mostly different cast, in June 2023.
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Sasha Cooke and Norman Reinhardt PHOTO: MICHAEL BISHOP
Houston
Ethel Smyth’s “The Wreckers” (1906) has benefited from the current effort to exhume forgotten works by BIPOC and women composers. Glyndebourne staged it last summer, and Houston Grand Opera opened a new production of it on Friday. In an earlier outing, at the Bard Festival in 2015, the opera came across as ferocious; here, it just seemed old-fashioned.
The story is promising: The villagers in an isolated 18th-century Cornwall community plunder ships that founder on their rocky coast and kill the survivors, justifying their actions as ordained by God. An unknown traitor is threatening their livelihood by lighting a warning beacon on the clifftop. The libretto, by Smyth’s lover Henry Brewster, deftly lays out the character conflicts: Thirza, the pastor Pascoe’s young wife, is an outsider who despises the wreckers’ work and is having a secret affair with Mark, a fisherman. Avis, Mark’s ex-girlfriend, hates Thirza and leads the hunt to pin the beacon-lighting on Pascoe to punish her; Pascoe, venerated by the community, is having strange visions.
But Smyth’s music has too many stylistic references: It aspires to Wagnerian sweep and there are hints of Debussy, particularly in a “La Mer”-like interlude before Act 3. The vigorous choral writing—both hymn-singing and mob frenzy—is static, and many of the arias are tuneful but shapeless. Sasha Cooke made the most of Thirza’s music with her luxuriant mezzo and impassioned delivery; soprano Mané Galoyan was also terrific, bringing a spiteful energy and high, flirty ease to Avis’s music, which sounds like it could be from “Carmen.” Despite his big baritone, Reginald Smith Jr.’s Pascoe was a cipher, and his mutton-chop facial hair was distracting. Tenor Norman Reinhardtsounded constrained as Mark. Of the supporting singers, mezzo Sun-Ly Pierce stood out in a brief appearance as Jack, the teenager with a crush on Avis.
Conductor Patrick Summers didn’t find either the frenzy or the brooding menace that can make the score work. Louisa Muller’s pedestrian directing and the literalness of Christopher Oram’s sets—the giant cross, the stone houses—along with Marcus Doshi’s lighting had the same problem. The show felt obvious and antiquated, right down to the lovers chained in a cave with the tide coming in (a nod to “Aida”). The libretto, originally in French, is usually performed in Smyth’s own English translation; in Houston, the company used an English version by Amanda Holden, which removes the archaic language and strives for a more contemporary flavor, but to little avail. Compared to Benjamin Britten’s brilliant “Peter Grimes,” an opera—now playing with a superb cast at the Metropolitan Opera—about an outsider in an insular coastal community, “The Wreckers” is a historical curiosity rather than a buried treasure.
Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
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