Federico García Lorca
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27, a group consisting mostly of poets who introduced the tenets of European movements into Spanish literature.
He initially rose to fame with Romancero gitano, a book of poems depicting life in his native Andalusia. His poetry incorporated traditional Andalusian motifs and avant-garde styles. After a sojourn in New York City from 1929 to 1930—documented posthumously in Poeta en Nueva York —he returned to Spain and wrote his best-known plays, Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba.
García Lorca was homosexual and suffered from depression after the end of his relationship with sculptor Emilio Aladrén Perojo. García Lorca also had a close emotional relationship for a time with Salvador Dalí, who said he rejected García Lorca's sexual advances.
García Lorca was [|assassinated] by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. His remains have never been found, and the motive remains in dispute; some theorize he was targeted for being gay, a socialist, or both, while others view a personal dispute as the more likely cause.
Life and career
Early years
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town 17 km west of Granada, southern Spain. His father, Federico García Rodríguez, was a prosperous landowner with a farm in the fertile vega near Granada and a comfortable villa in the heart of the city. García Rodríguez saw his fortunes rise with a boom in the sugar industry. García Lorca's mother, Vicenta Lorca Romero, was a teacher. In 1905, the family moved from Fuente Vaqueros to the nearby town of Valderrubio. In 1909, when the boy was 11, his family moved to the regional capital of Granada, where there was the equivalent of a high school; their best-known residence there is the summer home called the Huerta de San Vicente, on what were then the outskirts of the city of Granada. For the rest of his life, he maintained the importance of living close to the natural world, praising his upbringing in the country. All three of these homes—Fuente Vaqueros, Valderrubio, and Huerta de San Vicente—are today museums.In 1915, after graduating from secondary school, García Lorca attended the University of Granada. During this time his studies included law, literature, and composition. Throughout his adolescence, he felt a deeper affinity for music than for literature. When he was 11 years old, he began six years of piano lessons with Antonio Segura Mesa, a harmony teacher in the local conservatory and a composer. It was Segura who inspired Federico's dream of a career in music. His first artistic inspirations arose from scores by Claude Debussy, Frédéric Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven. Later, with his friendship with composer Manuel de Falla, Spanish folklore became his muse. García Lorca did not turn to writing until Segura's death in 1916, and his first prose works, such as "Nocturne", "Ballade", and "Sonata", drew on musical forms. His milieu of young intellectuals gathered in El Rinconcillo at the Café Alameda in Granada. In 1916 and 1917, García Lorca travelled throughout Castile, León, and Galicia, in northern Spain, with a professor of his university, who also encouraged him to write his first book, . Fernando de los Rios persuaded García Lorca's parents to let him move to the progressive, Oxbridge-inspired Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid in 1919, while nominally attending classes at the University of Madrid.
As a young writer
At the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, García Lorca befriended Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí and many other creative artists who were, or would become, influential across Spain. He was taken under the wing of the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, becoming close to playwright Eduardo Marquina and Gregorio Martínez Sierra, the Director of Madrid's Teatro Eslava.In 1919–20, at Sierra's invitation, he wrote and staged his first play, The Butterfly's Evil Spell. It was a verse play dramatising the impossible love between a cockroach and a butterfly, with a supporting cast of other insects; it was laughed off the stage by an unappreciative public after only four performances and influenced García Lorca's attitude to the theatre-going public for the rest of his career. He would later claim that Mariana Pineda, written in 1927, was, in fact, his first play. During his time at the Residencia de Estudiantes, he pursued degrees in law and philosophy, though he had more interest in writing than in study.
García Lorca's first book of poems, Libro de poemas, was published in 1921, collecting work written from 1918, and selected with the help of his brother Francisco. They concern the themes of religious faith, isolation, and nature that had filled his prose reflections. Early in 1922, at Granada García Lorca joined the composer Manuel de Falla in order to promote the Concurso de Cante Jondo, a festival dedicated to enhancing flamenco performance and its cante jondo style. "During this period, Lorca explored the brief genre of songs, exemplified by the poem 'Orchard, March', which was written between 1921 and 1924 and later collected in his book Canciones." The year before, García Lorca had begun to write his , so he naturally composed an essay on the art of flamenco, and began to speak publicly in support of the Concurso. At the music festival in June, he met the celebrated Manuel Torre, a flamenco cantaor. The next year in Granada he also collaborated with Falla and others on the musical production of a play for children, La niña que riega la albahaca y el príncipe preguntón adapted by Lorca from an Andalusian story. Inspired by the same structural form of sequence as "Deep Song", his collection Suites was never finished and was not published until 1983.
Over the next few years, García Lorca became increasingly involved in Spain's avant-garde. He published a poetry collection called Canciones, although it did not contain songs in the usual sense. Shortly after, Lorca was invited to exhibit a series of drawings at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona, from 25 June to 2 July 1927. Lorca's sketches were a blend of popular and avant-garde styles, complementing Canción. Both his poetry and drawings reflected the influence of traditional Andalusian motifs, Cubist syntax, and a preoccupation with sexual identity. Several drawings consisted of superimposed dreamlike faces. He later described the double faces as self-portraits, showing "man's capacity for crying as well as winning," in line with his conviction that sorrow and joy were as inseparable as life and death.
Romancero gitano, part of his Cancion series, became his best-known book of poetry. It was a highly stylised imitation of the ballads and poems that were still being told throughout the Spanish countryside. García Lorca describes the work as a "carved altar piece" of Andalusia with "gypsies, horses, archangels, planets, its Jewish and Roman breezes, rivers, crimes, the everyday touch of the smuggler and the celestial note of the naked children of Córdoba. A book that hardly expresses visible Andalusia at all, but where the hidden Andalusia trembles." In 1928, the book brought him fame across Spain and the Hispanic world, and it was only much later that he gained notability as a playwright. For the rest of his life, the writer would search for the elements of Andaluce culture, trying to find its essence without resorting to the "picturesque" or the clichéd use of "local colour".
His second play, Mariana Pineda, with stage settings by Salvador Dalí, opened to great acclaim in Barcelona in 1927. In 1926, García Lorca wrote the play The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife, which would not be shown until the early 1930s. It was a farce about fantasy, based on the relationship between a flirtatious, petulant wife and a hen-pecked shoemaker.From 1925 to 1928, he was passionately involved with Dalí. Although Dali's friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, Dalí said he rejected the erotic advances of the poet. With the success of "Gypsy Ballads", came an estrangement from Dalí and the breakdown of a love affair with sculptor Emilio Aladrén Perojo. These brought on an increasing depression, a situation exacerbated by his anguish over his homosexuality. He felt he was trapped between the persona of the successful author, which he was forced to maintain in public, and the tortured, authentic self, which he could acknowledge only in private. He also had the sense that he was being pigeon-holed as a "gypsy poet". He wrote: "The gypsies are a theme. And nothing more. I could just as well be a poet of sewing needles or hydraulic landscapes. Besides, this gypsyism gives me the appearance of an uncultured, ignorant and primitive poet that you know very well I'm not. I don't want to be typecast."
Growing estrangement between García Lorca and his closest friends reached its climax when surrealists Dalí and Luis Buñuel collaborated on their 1929 film Un Chien Andalou. García Lorca interpreted it, perhaps erroneously, as a vicious attack upon himself. At this time Dalí also met his future wife Gala. Aware of these problems, García Lorca's family arranged for him to make a lengthy visit to the United States in 1929–30.
In June 1929, García Lorca travelled to the US with Fernando de los Rios on the RMS Olympic, a sister liner to the RMS Titanic. They stayed mostly in New York City, where Rios started a lecture tour and García Lorca enrolled at Columbia University School of General Studies, funded by his parents. He studied English but, as before, was absorbed more by writing than by study. At Columbia, he lived in room 617 in Furnald Hall before moving to room 1231 in John Jay Hall. He also spent time in Vermont and later in Havana, Cuba.
His collection Poeta en Nueva York explores alienation and isolation through some graphically experimental poetic techniques and was influenced by the Wall Street crash which he personally witnessed.
This condemnation of urban capitalist society and materialistic modernity was a sharp departure from his earlier work and label as a folklorist. His play of this time, El público, was not published until the late 1970s and has never been published in its entirety, the complete manuscript apparently lost. However, the Hispanic Society of America in New York City retains several of his personal letters.