Opera in the 21st century is caught between two impulses: the push to say something new, and the pull to rely on what already works. New operas get commissioned and staged. Old standbys get revived, reimagined, and sometimes over-explained. Neither approach is wrong, but both carry risk. This spring, two productions running concurrently at Lyric Opera illustrated that tension as cleanly as anything I’ve seen in years.
Gabriela Lena Frank’s El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego arrived with serious momentum, while Matthew Ozawa’s production of Madama Butterfly took one of the most-performed operas in the repertoire and tried to fix what’s broken about it. One succeeds where the other stumbles, and together they make a useful case study in what opera gets right and wrong when it reaches for something beyond the obvious.
Exceptional singing marked both productions. Madama Butterfly was carried by Karah Son’s Cio-Cio San, who more than lived up to the reputation she has built in the role, while Evan LeRoy Johnson soared as Pinkerton. In Frida y Diego, Daniela Mack and Alfredo Daza infused natural feeling into their respective roles as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, which were otherwise thinly written.
Frida y Diego is Frank’s first opera, with a libretto by playwright Nilo Cruz. The story is an original fictional narrative that draws on history, biography, and the Orpheus myth. It has already been performed in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, and will soon reach the Metropolitan Opera—an impressive run for a newer work.
Is it worth the attention? Largely yes, with reservations. Of the new operas I’ve seen over the last 20 years, Frida y Diego holds together better than most. Its chief strength is the orchestral score. Frank creates an atmospheric, carefully composed fantasy that recalls Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, full of harmonies that resist coalescing into melody. For an opera centered on death and the afterlife, the approach is effective. Surprisingly, though, for a piece about two iconic Mexican artists, the score draws very little from Mexican musical traditions.
Frank’s treatment of the voice is where the piece struggles most. Like nearly all contemporary opera, there is a lot of sing-speaking, with few memorable moments for individual voices to break through. Two scenes are exceptions. The first is a quietly powerful exchange in which Frida is persuaded to return to the land of the living by Leonardo, an artist who longs to return to Earth himself (sung by Key’mon Winkfield Murrah, whose shimmering, fluid voice nearly steals the show). The second is a later passage in which the music turns jagged and menacing as Frida sings about her own pain while being pulled by red ribbons. Both moments land, but the fact that they do also draws attention to the lack of other rich vocal moments in the work.
The opera’s ending is where it matters most, and where it ultimately falls. When Frida and Diego finally embrace, knowing it will mean she feels and remembers everything from her painful life, the music feels underwritten. For a story built toward that moment, the payoff is muted. Cruz’s libretto shares some of the blame. His story is serviceable, but his words reveal little about the characters.
On the other hand, Ozawa’s production of Madama Butterfly makes the reverse mistake. Puccini’s music is beyond question: The melodies linger in the memory, and the vocal writing is perfectly matched to the opera’s tragic arc. The problem is the production itself.
Ozawa has said his goal is to reclaim Butterfly from its Orientalist tropes and fetishization of Asian femininity. The objective is genuinely noble. His solution is to reframe the opera as a virtual-reality fantasy: Pinkerton, in his real-world apartment, puts on a headset and is transported to a neon-lit, digitized Japan of his own invention. Act I makes this work surprisingly well. A wordless opening scene establishes the conceit cleanly—Pinkerton is the architect of this fantasy, and everything that follows is his projection.
The concept unravels in Acts II and III. Back in the real world, Pinkerton remains tethered to his game even as he attempts a relationship with a real woman. But when he re-enters the VR world, his real-world wife comes with him, and the logic of this bifurcated world collapses. In a traditional production, Pinkerton’s physical absence and return with his American wife, Kate, is dramatically straightforward. In Ozawa’s version, it’s unclear what Kate’s presence in the virtual world even means. Is she a manifestation of the game? Has Pinkerton imported her into his fantasy?
The closing scene is the most bewildering casualty. After Cio-Cio San hands her son to Pinkerton, she sheds her kimono and walks to the edge of the stage while a goggled Pinkerton is left holding her discarded garment. It’s a striking image. But it’s hard to feel the weight of her death when the entire premise has asked us to question whether she was ever real.
There are genuine insights in Ozawa’s vision. Pinkerton’s objectification of Cio-Cio San under his goggles is explicit and uncomfortable in exactly the right way. It recasts Pinkerton less as a colonial villain than as something more modern and more pathetic: an incel with a headset. But Ozawa’s frame ultimately works against the opera. When there are no real human stakes, it’s hard to grieve a real human loss.
What both productions share is ambition that outpaces execution—and that may be the defining condition of opera right now. Frank reaches for a new kind of storytelling and mostly gets there, even if the voice sometimes gets lost in the attempt. Ozawa reaches for a reckoning with a problematic masterpiece, finds a genuinely interesting idea, then pursues it somewhere the drama cannot follow. Neither failure is fatal. The singing alone justified showing up, and the best moments in each production are the kind that remind you why the form still matters. But opera doesn’t need more ambition. It needs ambition that knows when to get out of the way.
Matthew Ozawa discusses his concept for Madama Butterfly
“The Pain of Frida” from LA Opera’s Frida y Diego
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