Federico García Lorca is one of the most important and influential Spanish poets and dramatists of the twentieth century. The eldest of four children, he was born on 5 June 1898, to a wealthy landowner father, Federico García Rodríguez and a schoolteacher mother, Vicenta Lorca Romero. Lorca grew up in rural Andalusia, near Granada, surrounded by images and social conditions that would influence his future works.
A Law student at the University of Granada, it took Lorca nine years to complete his degree… he was better known for his extraordinary talents as a pianist. He turned to writing in his late teens with his first experiments in poetry and drama revealing a spiritual and sexual malaise along with an admiration of authors such as Shakespeare, Goethe and Antonio Machado.
In 1919, Lorca moved to Madrid, where he lived in a men’s residence hall with the filmmaker Luis Buñuel and the artist Salvador Dalí, who became a close companion. In the same year, Lorca published his first book, Impresiones y Paisajes (Impressions and Landscapes), and his first full-length play, El Maleficio de la mariposa (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell), was produced there the following year. Shortly after, he published Libro de poemas (Book of Poems), a compilation of poems based on Spanish folklore.
In 1922, Lorca and the composer Manuel de Falla organized the first cante jondo, or ‘deep song’ festival in Granada. Around this time, Lorca and his fellow residents Buñuel and Dali formed a group of artists known as the Generación del 27. It was this group that introduced Lorca to Surrealism, which greatly influenced his writing. Inspired by popular Spanish traditions and flamenco, Lorca continued to write throughout the 1920s, seen in his plays La zapatera prodigiosa (The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife) and El amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín (The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden). Both plays revealed themes common to Lorca’s work: the unpredictability of time, the destructive powers of love and death, the questions of identity, art, childhood, and sex.
In 1928, the publication of Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads), a poetry sequence inspired by the traditional Spanish romance, catapulted Lorca to fame. The following year he travelled to New York City where he found a connection between Spanish deep songs and the African American spirituals of Harlem. When he returned to Spain, Lorca co-founded La Barraca, a travelling theatre company that performed both Spanish classics and his original plays, including the well-known Bodas de Sangre(Blood Wedding), in small town squares. Despite the growing fascist movement in his country, Lorca refused to hide his leftist political views, or his homosexuality, while continuing his ascent as a writer.
With the 1933 premiere of Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding), Lorca achieved his first major theatrical success and helped inaugurate the most brilliant era of Spanish theatre since the Golden Age. The same year, he travelled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to oversee several productions of his plays and to give a lecture series.
In August 1936, at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was working on Aurelia and La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House ofBernarda Alba) when he was arrested in Granada by Nationalist forces, who despised his homosexuality and his liberal views, and imprisoned without a trial. He was executed by a firing squad on either 18 or 19 August (the precise date has never been verified).
Though short, Federico García Lorca’s life was full of stories and had an immense impact on the Spanish art scene. Relive this incredible life through the eyes of Catalan actress Margarita Xirgu, whose greatest contribution was her advancement of Lorca’s plays, with Ainadamarthis Autumn, performing in Cardiff, Llandudno, Bristol, Plymouth, Birmingham, Milton Keynes and Southampton between 9 September to 22 November.