Gabriela Lena Frank’s Met Debut Anchors Contemporary Season

The Metropolitan Opera's premiere of Gabriela Lena Frank’s El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego marks the house's first Spanish-language production in the current era. The score is built on a sophisticated polytonality (the simultaneous use of two or more keys in a musical composition) that Frank employs to delineate the distinct sound-worlds of the protagonists. While the Met’s marketing emphasizes the demographic milestones of the appointment, the work’s success is anchored in its formal construction and the clarity of its orchestration. The failure of recent commissions at the Met has often been a failure of structural ambition; Frank’s opera avoids this by adhering to a rigorous harmonic logic that supports its folk-inflected material.