About the work
Wolfgang Fortner's opera „Bluthochzeit" (Blood Wedding) was premiered in Cologne in 1957. It is based on the play of the same name, „Bodas de sangre" (1932), by Federico García Lorca. The work joins the archaic world of the Spanish original, steeped in death and fate, with the expressive idiom of German postwar modernism.
Plot
In rural Spain a Bridegroom prepares for his wedding to the Bride. But the Bride is still attached to Leonardo, her former love — a man now married, from the family that once killed the Bridegroom's father and brother. Over the union lies the shadow of an old blood feud. On the wedding day, scarcely is the marriage performed when the Bride flees with Leonardo. The Bridegroom takes up the pursuit. In a nocturnal forest, where symbolic figures — the Moon and Death — direct the action, the two men meet and kill each other. The Bride returns; in a great lament the Mother and the women mourn the fallen. The cycle of violence has triumphed once again.
Cultural significance
„Bluthochzeit" is among the most significant German operas of the postwar period and made Lorca's tragedy fruitful for music theatre. In it Fortner combines freely tonal and serial techniques with an immediately dramatic effect. The work opened a whole series of Lorca settings and belongs to the repertoire of twentieth-century opera.