By Sylvia Sherno
Coinciding with LA Opera’s production of Ainadamar (April 26-May18, 2025), from Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov and conducted by LAO resident artist Lina González-Granados, we take a look at the true story of the remarkable artist whose all-too-short life nonetheless left an indelible mark on history.
The Opera
The city of Granada, in southern Spain’s Andalusia region, is the birthplace of one of that country’s most revered modern writers, and arguably one of the most recognizable names in 20th century European literature: Federico García Lorca. The poet and playwright is also the subject of Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov’s opera, Ainadamar. The Grammy-awarded “opera in three images” premiered in Tanglewood in 2003 and is set to close LA Opera’s 2024-2025 season.
Named for the natural spring found in the hills above Granada, Ainadamar (in Arabic “fountain of tears”) depicts the final hours of García Lorca’s life, as remembered by the Catalán actress Margarita Xirgu, García Lorca’s friend and muse who appeared in many of his plays. The opera traces some of the parallels running through García Lorca’s life, artistic themes and political beliefs. Margarita Xirgu, for example, devoted much of her career to the role of the 19th century liberalist heroine and martyr, Mariana Pineda, protagonist of García Lorca’s 1925 play of the same name who also figures importantly in Ainadamar.
Mirroring Pineda’s antipathy to tyranny, both García Lorca and Xirgu opposed the fascist forces that were threatening to overtake the Spanish political landscape. The actress, like García Lorca, was known to the authorities for her socialist sympathies; she eventually sought safety in Uruguay. Despite her urging, however, García Lorca remained behind in Spain and, tragically, was captured and executed one month after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
García Lorca’s own biography anticipates some of the parallels suggested in the opera.
Lorca in 1932 in front of a poster for the Teatro Universitario La Barraca.
A Gushing Creative Wellspring
Born in 1898 in Granada, Federico García Lorca early on exhibited an undeniable artistic bent. Even as a child, he was drawn to music, poetry, puppetry and theater, enthusiasms that, in turn, became the well-spring of his own creative expression. A gifted pianist and guitarist and a precocious composer, the young Federico planned to make a career in music. Although he soon turned to literature, music remained a passion throughout his life, as the inherent musicality suffusing his poems and his dramatic works attests.
As a youth, García Lorca was also a talented caricaturist whose drawings often accompanied his letters to friends, as well as the books he read or inscribed. His whimsical illustrations were published in newspapers and exhibited in galleries, and came to grace the pages of his own works and those of other writers. He continued drawing throughout his life. Indeed, his understanding of color, space and line enriched the staging of his dramatic works.
The arts were not his only focus of attention, however. While he might have hailed from a wealthy, landowning family, García Lorca, the eldest of four, was nonetheless exposed to the social and economic disparities in his native Andalusia. The desperation of the landless poor, the disenfranchised status of women in a historically patriarchal society, the oppression exercised by rigid and outmoded social, political and religious forces: these are among the diverse strands that García Lorca wove into the fabric of his own enduring art.
Argentine mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack as Lorca in Ainadamar.
Going Deep
During his prolonged university stint as a less-than-engaged law student, García Lorca was befriended by the much older composer Manuel de Falla. The Spanish composer’s model of artistry and his passion for the music of Andalusia, especially the traditional gypsy “deep song” (cante jondo), stirred García Lorca’s imagination.
In 1922 the two collaborated in the organization of a cante jondo festival and competition, with the purpose of revitalizing this traditional folk genre. In a lecture on the “Architecture of the Cante Jondo,” García Lorca distinguished between “deep song” as an expression of the pure voice and spirit of the gypsy people; and flamenco which, in his view, was cante jondo’s clichéd, inauthentic twin. For García Lorca, true cante jondo conveyed the most sensual of passions alongside a profound awareness of death’s inevitability.
Residing within what he called the “bloodcurdling” sounds of the “deep song” was the true gypsy voice, the voice of a historically marginalized people and its culture. When García Lorca published his own Poem of the Deep Song in 1931, he was paying homage to the “marvelous artistic truth” he sensed at the root of the old gypsy form. Interestingly, the poem is built around a theme and variations, an organizing principal García Lorca had absorbed in his musical studies.
Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads) (1928) is probably García Lorca’s best-known poetry collection and the book that brought him to widespread public prominence. His ballads were inspired by the medieval Andalusian romances, songs by traveling Spanish minstrels that recounted sparsely detailed, enigmatic stories of universal human emotions. Romancero gitano retained the lyric flavor of the original ballads and used deceptively simple language to narrate tales of heroic gypsy characters often caught up in tragic circumstances. In Gypsy Ballads, García Lorca created a new gypsy mythology around bronze-skinned horsemen and unfaithful wives, smugglers and silversmiths silhouetted against the night, under the watchful eyes of a green moon, or moved by mysterious green winds. Or hunted, as the poet knew from harrowing real-life stories heard in the Granada of his childhood, by the vicious Civil Guard. García Lorca’s understanding of Spain’s social and political hierarchies, which effectively relegated the gypsies to society’s margins, likely accounts for the sympathetic light the writer shed on his characters.
A scene from Scottish Opera's 2022 production of Ainadamar.
Not surprisingly, García Lorca’s sympathies extended to other peoples and communities who were, like the gypsies, victimized and marginalized. When, fatigued by all the attention unexpectedly showered upon Gypsy Ballads in Spain (not to mention the envy directed toward him by friends and colleagues), the poet fled to Cuba and New York, where he spent an artistically fertile several months between 1929 and 1930. Even before his arrival in New York, “citadel of Western capitalism,” García Lorca had already articulated a distaste for what he anticipated would be a “horrible” city. Those early imaginings of the city’s human throngs, stridently roaring cars and looming buildings proved prescient. He lamented the absence of nature and human warmth amid the harsh dissonances of the concrete cityscape, and concluded that America’s much vaunted democracy merely meant that “only the very rich have maids here.”
Feeling alienated in the big city, he nevertheless challenged those conditions by making them the basis of a new artistic project, a volume of verses entitled Poet in New York (1929-30). In poems like “Dance of Death,” “King of Harlem” and “Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne),” García Lorca employed shocking language and surrealistic images to transform dehumanized ugliness and an aura of death into artistic energy. Even the depredations suffered by Blacks in white society, while not erased, are lifted by expressions of vitality. So, too, in “Ode to Walt Whitman,” did García Lorca allude openly to New York’s derided, shadowy homosexual subculture, re-envisioning homoerotic love as a part of nature that “bestows crowns of joy.”
We might speculate that García Lorca’s homosexuality sensitized him to the repression and asphyxiating silence endured by others. Whatever the origins of his empathy, women occupied a special place in his artistic regard. His observations of relatives and neighbors drew his attention to the limited roles historically ascribed to women in Spanish society: namely, wife, mother, spinster, nun. Ruled by rigid social conventions and the strict disciplines of Catholic orthodoxy, women were expected to pay unquestioning obeisance to male authority and to accept, in silence, their inferior status, even within the confines of the domestic sphere.
The Rural Trilogy
García Lorca’s trilogy of so-called “rural tragedies” dramatized the problematics of Spanish womanhood and, by extension, of Spanish society as a whole.
American soprano Angel Blue as Margarita Xirgu and Argentine mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack as Federico García Lorca in a scene from the Metropolitan Opera's 2024 production of Ainadamar.
Blood Wedding (1933), the first in the trilogy, was inspired by a notorious scandal involving a bride who eloped with her cousin on her wedding day. García Lorca raised the story of forbidden love and death to the level of classical Greek tragedy, the characters remaining nameless archetypes (Bride, Bridegroom, etc.) – all except Leonardo, the hypermasculine lover. Interestingly, the writer’s passion for music is evident in the way he “orchestrated” alternating male and female voices, as in a Greek chorus. Blood Wedding, in fact, is thought to be the most musical of García Lorca’s plays.
Yerma (1934), the second of the rural dramas, was referred to by its author not as a play, but as a “tragic poem.” Poetic passages are interspersed throughout, while much of the dialogue contains the rhythms and rhymes of poetry. The play revolves around the question of fertility, motherhood and the inability to attain one’s destiny. Central to the drama is the question of gender as a fulfillment of nature. The title character herself is seen as “mannish” by the townspeople, and Yerma’s husband, Juan, is associated with images of sterility. Ironically, the protagonist’s name, Yerma, refers to a barren expanse, thus anticipating the thwarting of nature that is the character’s dramatic and personal tragedy.
Completing the trilogy is perhaps García Lorca’s best-known play, as well as his final, completed work: The House of Bernarda Alba (1936). García Lorca described the play as a “drama of women in the villages of Spain,” thereby enlarging his scope beyond the stage to address the oppressed circumstances of Spanish women in general. García Lorca relied on his painter’s eye to define precisely the play’s setting: all three acts take place within the thick, white walls of Bernarda’s house, the white in sharp contrast to the black clothing required by custom to mark the period of grief on the death of a husband. The house is inhabited by Bernarda, the despotic matriarch, her five daughters, representing various degrees of social and sexual inhibition and restraint, and two maids. The stage is occupied exclusively by these women, who pass their time with needle and thread, gossiping, trading malevolent remarks and stealing glances at the men outside. Men are, in fact, conspicuously absent from the stage. The play ends tragically with the death of the youngest daughter, and Bernarda, fabricating her own reality out of the appearance of reality. García Lorca’s underlying message is that, in such dogmatic and authoritarian circumstances, both men and women are victims.
Garcia Lorca, whose leftist political affiliations and liberal social attitudes were well known in Spain, quite consciously depicted in The House of Bernarda Alba against the backdrop of the ever-tightening noose of fascistic tyranny. He did not live to see the play produced.
Federico García Lorca was executed, almost certainly by soldiers in the army of General Francisco Franco, in August 1936, one month after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was 38 years old.
The site of his execution was Ainadamar.
The House of Bernarda Alba was produced in Buenos Aires in 1945 but was not staged in Spain until 1950. Until then, even reading the play was strictly prohibited.
Sylvia Sherno holds a PhD in Spanish literature from UCLA, where she taught for almost thirty years. Her specialty is contemporary Spanish poetry.