About the work
Federico García Lorca wrote Blood Wedding in 1932, prompted by a newspaper report about an actual crime in the Andalusian province of Almería in 1928. Conceived as a tragedy, the play premiered on 8 March 1933 at the Teatro Infanta Beatriz in Madrid and turned Lorca, for the first time, into a commercially successful playwright. Together with Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, it forms Lorca's so-called Andalusian trilogy about women in the rural south of Spain.
Plot
In Andalusia, a bride marries a well-off bridegroom even though she still longs for Leonardo, her former love from a feuding family. On her wedding day she flees with the now-married Leonardo into the forest, and the bridegroom's family sets out in pursuit. Leonardo and the bridegroom kill each other, and the blood-stained bride returns as mother and bride mourn the dead.
Cultural significance
"Blood Wedding" is considered Lorca's breakthrough for the stage, fusing everyday speech with song, choral passages and the symbolically charged imagery of knife, moon and blood. Banned under Franco's dictatorship in Spain, it was staged abroad early on and received its German-language premiere in Zurich in 1944; in 1957 Wolfgang Fortner turned the story into an opera.