IS THERE REALLY such a thing as true love? And are we, as mere mortals, with our life’s problems, pragmatics and chronology plotted before us, really equipped to understand the value of true love and its implications? If she or he hurts you while you are both alive, does that immortal love dissolve and become nothing forever? These are ideas tossed into the fabric of the night in Gabriela Lena Frank’s debut opera about the after lives of modernist Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego which screens on 16 June 2026 in South Africa, under Ster Kinekor, filmed some months ago at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

And it’s a humdinger of a tale, if ever there was, bringing in La Catrina, the Keeper of the Dead (soprano Gabriella Reyes) and a Greta Garbo tribute act, with a sublime nod to Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spiderwoman in the form of a gender fluid character called Leonardo (tenor Nils Wander) all together on the ancient Aztec Day of the Dead festival. Sounds like a fruit salad? You’d better believe it!

The sense of colour and fabric is astounding and the attention to art historical detail is gorgeous but never coloured by mimicry or cheap reproduction of great art. Punted as a magical realist work, the piece doesn’t labour over the idea of creating a biopic, and instead focuses on the year 1957. It’s the year of Diego Rivera’s death.

But let’s take a step back a bit. Rivera and Kahlo were the artist superstar couple of their era. He was a renowned communist who created inflammatory murals, few of which are still standing today — many were destroyed for political reasons. She was a painter who depicted the agony of her life – born with spina bifida, she developed polio as a six year old, and was forever broken by a traffic accident between a streetcar and a bus when she was a teenager. It left her unable to have children and encased in a plaster corset around her torso for the rest of her life. Her left leg was amputated in 1953, and she died a year later, at the age of just 47.

And what did she do when she wasn’t suffering the agony of the damned? Why, she painted. Self portraits. Many, many of them. And these paintings, her unibrow, her fluid sexuality and passionate love life inflamed popular culture forever, giving romance to the horror that was her life.

She met Rivera, an established artist and very large man twenty years her senior, in 1922. In 1929, they married to the horror of her conservative family who famously referred to the couple as the elephant and the dove. It was to be a tempestuous relationship on every level. Kahlo died in 1954, three years before Rivera. His family refused to allow his ashes to be mixed with hers for perpetuity, which he had requested in his Will, and it is upon this premise that Frank’s beautiful and quirky opera rests, taking that postmortem wish to fruition.

It is here where the dead rise palpably and in beautiful costumes and magnificent choreography, to jiggle their bones and have discourse with those who mourn them. Frida herself, magnificently played by mezzo soprano Isabel Leonard takes the whole of the first act to be convinced to meet her husband, played with compassion by baritone Carlos Álvarez, again, after much betrayal and sadness inflicted while she was alive. But meet him she does. And he’s a changed and beaten man, willing to declare his unquenchable love to her, and sweep her off her ghoulish feet all over again and back to the netherworld.

With music, set and costumes that make you wish to leap out of your chair with delight, this is an extraordinary work that speaks to the integrity of wise storytelling at its most respectfully researched and playfully put together. Featuring a couple of wonderful interviews with the makers of the work, on no level does this piece feel like a self-consciously contemporary work or a boring tractate in art history and pays brilliant and potent tribute to not only the lives and works of Frida and Diego, but to a love story peppered by Aztec trickery, themes and possibilities.

• El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego is composed by Gabriela Lena Frank with libretti by Nilo Cruz for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Headed by Carlos Álvarez, Isabel Leonard, Gabriella Reyes and Nils Wander, it is conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, directed and choreographed by Deborah Colker and features set and costume design by Jon Bausor. It is in Spanish with English subtitles and screens in South Africa by Ster Kinekor and Cinema Nouveau nationwide on 16 June 2026.