Federico García Lorca

Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, and the piano, 1898–1919

Federico García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, a farming village on the fertile plain west of Granada. His father, Federico García Rodríguez, was a landowner grown rich in the sugar boom; his mother, Vicenta Lorca Romero, had been a teacher. The family moved to Granada itself in 1909, and their summer house on the city's edge, the Huerta de San Vicente, became the poet's working refuge for the rest of his life. All three family homes are museums today.[1]

Music came before poetry. From eleven he studied piano with Antonio Segura Mesa, dreamed of a composer's career, and took his first inspirations from Debussy, Chopin and Beethoven. Only after Segura's death in 1916 did he turn seriously to writing. His first prose pieces carried musical titles: Nocturne, Ballade, Sonata. At the University of Granada he nominally read law while running with the young intellectuals of the Café Alameda's back corner. A professor's study trips through Castile and Galicia produced his first book, Impressions and Landscapes, printed at his father's expense in 1918.[1]

The Residencia de Estudiantes: Dalí, Buñuel, and the first books, 1919–1928

In 1919 Fernando de los Ríos persuaded Lorca's parents to send him to the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, the Oxford-styled college that was becoming the engine room of the Spanish avant-garde. There he met Luis Buñuel and, in 1922, Salvador Dalí, and was taken up by the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. His first staged play, The Butterfly's Evil Spell, a verse drama of a cockroach in love with a butterfly, was laughed off the stage in four performances in 1920, a wound that shaped his relationship with audiences for life.[1]

The books built through the decade: Libro de poemas (1921), the flamenco-soaked Poem of the Deep Song, written from 1921 around the cante jondo festival he organised in Granada with the composer Manuel de Falla, then Canciones. In 1927 Barcelona's Galeries Dalmau exhibited his drawings, and his play Mariana Pineda, with sets by Dalí, opened there to acclaim. The friendship with Dalí, at its most intense from 1925 to 1928, was mutual passion; Dalí later said he refused Lorca's advances, and told the story differently every decade.[1]

Romancero gitano (1928), eighteen ballads of an invented, mythic Andalusia of gypsies, archangels and civil guards, made him the most famous poet in the Spanish-speaking world almost overnight. He hated the cage that came with it, protesting that the gypsies were a theme and nothing more, and that he could as well be a poet of sewing needles or hydraulic landscapes.[1]

Crisis and New York, 1928–1930

Fame arrived with a private collapse. The intimacy with Dalí broke as Gala entered Dalí's life, and a love affair with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén ended badly. Un Chien Andalou, the 1929 film Dalí made with Buñuel, struck Lorca, perhaps wrongly, as an attack on him personally. Depressed, and carrying a homosexuality he could acknowledge only in private, he let his family send him abroad. In June 1929 he sailed for New York and enrolled, nominally, at Columbia University.[2]

The city gave him his strangest book. Poet in New York, published only after his death, answers Wall Street, Harlem and the Crash he personally witnessed with a surrealism of alienation and protest, as far from the Andalusian ballads as he ever travelled. A happier season in Havana closed the journey, and he returned to a Spain that had just become the Second Republic.[1]

La Barraca and the rural trilogy, 1931–1936

In 1931 the Republic's education ministry funded La Barraca, a student theatre company with a portable stage, and put Lorca in charge. The troupe trucked classical Spanish drama, Lope de Vega and Calderón, into villages that had never seen a play, with Lorca directing and acting. The theatre, he said, is a school of weeping and of laughter, a free forum where outmoded norms can be questioned.[1]

On the road with La Barraca he wrote the tragedies that hold the world's stages now: Blood Wedding (1932), Yerma (1934), and The House of Bernarda Alba. He finished the last in June 1936, two months before his death, and never saw its five daughters locked in a widow's house performed. A triumphant 1933–34 season in Buenos Aires, where he delivered the famous lecture on the duende, the dark force great art draws from an awareness of death, made him financially independent of his father for the first time. His last poems, the Sonnets of Dark Love, went unpublished for nearly half a century.[1]

The murder, August 1936

The military rising of July 1936 caught Lorca in Granada, a city that fell to the rebels at once and began shooting its Republicans. His brother-in-law, Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, the Socialist mayor of Granada, was executed. Lorca, a signatory of Popular Front manifestos and a famous voice of the left, took shelter in the house of the poet Luis Rosales, whose brothers were senior Falangists. He was arrested there by the former rightist deputy Ramón Ruiz Alonso.[3]

On or about 19 August 1936, Nationalist militia shot Lorca beside the road between Víznar and Alfacar, outside Granada, together with two bullfighters' banderilleros, Joaquín Arcollas and Francisco Galadí, and a schoolteacher, Dióscoro Galindo. He was 38. A Franco-era police report, made public in 2015, records the regime's own justification: it describes him as a socialist and freemason who engaged in what it called abnormal practices. Historians still argue the exact weight of politics, his homosexuality, and local feuds in the killing; Ian Gibson, who has studied it for fifty years, places it inside the organised extermination of Granada's Popular Front supporters.[3]

His body has never been found. Excavations near Alfacar in 2009, 2014 and 2016 all came up empty, and the search, entangled with Spain's larger reckoning over the graves of the Franco era, continues. The Falangist press itself, within a year, printed the sentence that has outlived every excuse: the finest poet of Imperial Spain has been assassinated.[3]

How Lorca wrote

Lorca's manner fuses what Spain kept apart: the oldest popular forms, ballad, lullaby, flamenco letra, with the newest European imagery. The Romancero gitano runs on the traditional eight-syllable ballad line while its metaphors behave like surrealism; the New York poems abandon the folk scaffolding for free-verse hallucination; the late sonnets return to the strictest sixteenth-century form. He was also a musician who collected and arranged folksongs, and a gifted draughtsman whose double-faced self-portraits he explained as man's capacity for crying as well as winning.

The plays move the same fusion onto the stage: verse and song embedded in prose tragedy, rural Andalusia raised to myth, and at the center, again and again, women imprisoned by honour, barrenness and walls. His theory is in the duende lecture: great art requires a vivid awareness of death, contact with a nation's soil, and the acknowledgement that reason has limits.

Afterlife

Franco's Spain banned Lorca's work wholesale until 1953 and let his name stand for everything the regime had buried; his international standing only grew, and the plays became repertory staples on every continent. He is now among the most translated of all Spanish writers, and Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba are performed as constantly as any twentieth-century tragedies.

In Spain his absence is an institution: the three family houses around Granada are museums, the Centro Federico García Lorca in Granada holds his manuscripts, and each failed excavation at Víznar returns his murder to the front pages. The missing grave has become what his poems kept foretelling, the image of all the war's unfound dead.[1]