About the work
In seinem Garten liebt Don Perlimplín Belisa ("In His Garden Don Perlimplín Loves Belisa") is a chamber opera by Wolfgang Fortner, after the play of the same name by Federico García Lorca. It was first performed in 1962 at the Schwetzingen Festival. Fortner, one of the formative teachers of postwar German modernism, sets Lorca's tragicomic "erotic alleluia" with refined, partly twelve-tone sonority, Spanish colour and great transparency.
Plot
The old, unworldly Don Perlimplín is persuaded by his housekeeper to marry the young, sensual Belisa. On the very wedding night Belisa betrays him. Rather than take revenge, Perlimplín resolves to awaken true love in her: he invents a mysterious young suitor, in whose red cloak he himself appears, and so kindles Belisa's passion for the stranger. At the climax Perlimplín stabs himself in the guise of the young lover — and dies, so that Belisa may truly love, and mourn, for the first time.
Cultural significance
Fortner's chamber opera is among the most noted German operas of the postwar period and brought Lorca's poetic world to the musical stage. The work unites Spanish colour with the rigour of modernism and is regarded as a key piece for German music theatre of the 1960s.