In April, The New York Times reported that the Metropolitan Opera’s partnership with Saudi Arabia had fallen through due to the conflict in Iran and disruptions to oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. The agreement was expected to bring the organization up to $200 million over eight years, providing some relief from the debt the Metropolitan Opera has been carrying since the pandemic. Such fiscal fragility is exacerbated by an ageing patron class, which reportedly remains sceptical of expensive, contemporary productions. Such are the conditions for the Met’s premiere of the Gabriela Lena Frank and Nilo Cruz’s opera El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego. 

Having first premiered in 2022 at San Diego Opera, the opera’s success is sustained by the interest shown for the Mexican artist in the musical field alone, as seen in Robert Xavier Rodriguez’s Frida (1991) and Kalevi Aho's Frida y Diego (2014). In spite of the current financial crisis, Met’s general manager Peter Gelb has then reason to be optimistic about the success of Frida y Diego, as the box office is projected to sell more than 80 percent of its capacity before the last performance on June 5. Further promotion is taking place at multiple levels, between partnerships with Mexican restaurants, a companion Museum of Modern Art exhibition co-curated by the opera’s costume and set designer, and the employment of influencers to reach younger audiences.

The cultural landscape seems ready to welcome such a work, as magical realism and South American and Caribbean culture seem to be becoming more and more present in the cultural landscape. The theme for the 61^st Venice Biennale, Netflix’s Cien años de soledad (2024), Torres’s Problemista (2023), Ross’s novel Popisho (2021), and to a lesser extent Filho’s The Secret Agent (2025) and this year’s production of Dostal’s Clivia at the Theater Magdeburg are examples of a genre which naturalizes the extraordinary within the historical and the likely.

Although Angel Flores’s 1955 essay, Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction, attributes the movement’s origins to Jorge Luis Borges, the term has European roots. Franz Roh first utilised Magischer Realismus in 1925 to describe the Post-Expressionist New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) style of painting, as it presented a visually accurate portrayal of the material world while including the uncanny 'magical' qualities of modernity (Bowers, 2004). Magischer Realismus was then imported to Latin America through the works of Bontempelli and his personal acquaintance with Uslar-Pietri, who later used the term realismo mágico in 1948, analogous to Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso. This contextualises the movement within Latin American vanguardia (Bowers, 2004) and draws away from the 'naive essentialist argument to the supposed marvelous reality of the [Latin American] continent or ascribed to the unidirectional flow of metropolitan influences', as argued by Chanady (1985, 141). Still, though Magical Realism and Surrealism are easily contrasted at a conceptual level (the latter dealing with abstract, psychological and subconscious realities), Chanady suggests that the often strident critique of Surrealism by Latin American writers should be perhaps forgiven as a 'symbolic parricide due to the anxiety of influence of formerly colonized societies' (138). For her part, Kahlo attacked European-style Surrealism, and regarded it as 'a decadent manifestation of bourgeois art'. Her poor experience featuring in the exhibitions either orchestrated or influenced by André Breton (at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938, at the Renou et Colle Gallery in Paris in 1939, and at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City in 1940) might have contributed to this opinion, especially if one considers the impact Breton had on the perception of her art by labelling it as Surrealist.

Magical realism does not rupture narrative logic, but rather mirrors the irrationality of the real, so that there is no real hierarchy between the supernatural and the natural. This contrasts with fantasy, which frames the supernatural as unfamiliar and thus remarkable, and science fiction, which relies on a novum, a 'strange newness' representing a technical or conceptual shift from current systems. Nevertheless, both magical realism and science fiction are 'not only a reflecting of but also on reality', as put by Suvin (1979, p. 22). One examples of this is the 'bureaucratic magical realism' employed by Julio Torres to illustrate the absurdity of the migrant experience, literalising the nature of late-stage capitalism. Similarly, Koyo Kouoh’s vision for In Minor Keys at the Venice Biennale highlights the 'rhythms and physical and metaphysical infrastructures of urban existence', and 'the slippage between quotidian, natural and cosmic scales', creating an atmosphere for 'reverie, solemnity, devotion, and wonder'. María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s dual portrait of Koyo Kouoh (who passed away in May 2025, leaving her collaborators to complete her vision) and Toni Morrison (whose novel Beloved was used as a theoretical lens for the exhibition), however, is not so much reverential as grateful to two authors who acknowledged marginalised perspectives and the relationship between human and 'other' experiences.

In its own dual portrait, El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego navigates the tension between aesthetics and truth-telling by framing the relationship between Kahlo and Rivera as an Orphic reversal. It rejects the biopic format in favour of dream-logic, thus avoiding the 'nostalgia trap' by deconstructing the tropes that have turned Kahlo into a pop-culture sticker. Though her own persona is prominent in her work (as she used her mestiza identity to explore issues of Mexicanness, colonization, and sexual discourse), the posthumous commercialization of Kahlo image has had a significant impact on the understanding of her art and biography, either emphasising her status as a minority, her medical condition, or her relationship with Rivera, or reducing it to a mostly aesthetic 'Fridamania'. 

This incomplete reading of Kahlo replicates the induced nostalgia currently permeating media. The DISCO Network’s book Technoskepticism (2025) discusses this phenomenon in its digital manifestations. Contemporary audiences seem to be retreating into a digital, fragmented longing for past media, as seen in reruns, reboots, and ‘archival’ aesthetics, with some selectivity in determining which pasts are to be preserved for recollection. Critics hold this form of nostalgia to act as a form of sedation similar to the escapist fiction. For example, Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) tend to quantify and instrumentalise the extraordinary rather than having it provide insight on the state of the world. 

It is true that video games such as these are only one of the 'wastes of time' that can represent a rebellion against the idea of what Kouoh described as 'a relentlessly accelerated productivity'. Freud himself regarded escapism as a channel towards the auxiliary constructions required to deal with real life situations, and C. S. Lewis saw it as a means to refreshing and expanding the imaginative powers. However, in today’s context, one must account for the new possibilities unlocked by digital escapism, which according to their use can either relieve or perpetuate social isolation, especially when viewers experience social relationships within media narratives and through digital tools that have yet to be designed to be life-enriching (Gabbiadini, Baldissarri, Valtorta et al., 2021). To this point, Berry (2026) has presented opera-going as a means to reducing that very same social isolation, emphasising the collective presence in a theatre and participating in the arts as ways to reduce stress and improve emotional well-being, as shown by Fancourt and Finn (2019). It may also be that the difference in perception of new musical operas when contrasted to well established repertoire or even more conventional stagings is a manifestation of these issues of nostalgia and escapism outside of the digital. What sceptical audiences may not appreciate is how contemporary productions can address contemporary matters and issues, or have them emerge by reinterpreting traditional works through a modern lens.

The surrealist capacity for 'epistemological problematization', that is, destabilising factual and logical frameworks (De la Campa 1995), is one we predict will become more and more necessary when engaging with cultural works in future. Without it calling for a constantly committed analytical mindset, such an approach may aid in raising awareness of the lens, the form, and the silence of the medium itself, and may shed deeper insight on its underlying mechanisms at the cost of discomfort. In this, Kouoh sought not to repeat the encyclopedic compulsion of the past 'to see and name' (similarly, Luis Leal claimed that 'if you can explain it, then it's not magical realism'), but to create an 'archipelago of oases […] experiential and metaphorical gardens' that invite deep listening. Its concern is not be a 'litany of commentary on world events', nor to provide opportunities for 'inattention or escape from compounding and continuous intersecting crises' (parallel to the 'systematic evasion' described by the DISCO Network). This year’s edition, however, has had to face a number of protests and resignations sparked by Russia, Israel and the United States being allowed to take part, so that while they are not the leading theme in the exhibition, current affairs are still very much present, sometimes blatantly so. As reported by Davis (2026), the poem If I Must Die by Rafaat al-Areer, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in December 2023, is the very first thing you see on entering the Arsenale. It would seem then that the Biennale is as stage for lower frequencies to manifest themselves as they endure ‘in spite of’ the world outside its gates.

Kahlo’s art is undoubtedly psychological, but it is remains firmly tethered to the material. The magical elements she employs, as well as the very act of painting, were a gateway to understanding and coming to terms with reality, rather than escaping it. A collective return to the arts, be it theatre or the fine arts, may then create opportunities to face the world by being part of it. One only has to have the presence of mind and the time to pause and contemplate if we, as artist Pauline Oliveros puts it, are to be 'changed by the listening'.

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