Sophie Haigney and Nilo Cruz at the Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER
The underworld, limbo, and purgatory appear often in myth and the classics. Were there any tales that were on your mind as you were writing?
CRUZ
I started to think about what the rules of this liminal world should be, so I thought of the Greek myth “Orpheus and Eurydice,” and the rules in that story. In “Orpheus and Eurydice,” it is Orpheus who goes into the underworld—by charming the gods with his music—and when he is guiding Eurydice out of the world of the dead, one of the rules is that he cannot turn back. I thought, Well, it could be interesting in this world of Frida and Diego if the dead could not touch the living—if Frida is touched by Diego, she has to relive the pain she experienced in life, not only physically but emotionally. I thought that would be an interesting law to have in the opera, and of course, that it would be interesting for that law to be broken, which then causes the tragedy of the piece. I loved discovering, little by little, the complexities of this unfamiliar world. For me, opera should embrace the mythical, or grand themes.
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