Blood Wedding Background

About Blood Wedding

Federico García Lorca maintained a lifelong interest in the music and culture of rural Spain, a fascination that heavily influenced one of his most acclaimed tragedies, Blood Wedding. More directly, the play was inspired by a sensational crime that Lorca read about in the Madrid daily ABC in 1928. In the farming village of Níjar, a young man had been murdered after attempting to run away with a bride on the eve of her wedding. It was later revealed that the murderer had been the groom's cousin.

Lorca followed the investigation closely, and the people involved may have helped him develop the characters in the play. Like the Bride, the woman in question was "of independent character" and from a relatively wealthy family (Gibson 335). The groom in question was, like the Bridegroom, kind but perhaps overprotected by his mother, and the details of the wedding in the play closely parallel those of the real-life wedding party. Lorca wrote the play in a feverish, intense burst of activity while listening to a Bach cantata over and over--most likely Wachtet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Gibson 334).

Blood Wedding was well-received in Spain and abroad, with an English-language performance in New York only a year after its first production in Spain. The play was banned during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, but is now a well-loved classic both in Spain and internationally.