Federico García Lorca was a musician before he was a poet. In his youth, he was closely interested in Spanish folklore and folk tunes.
Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca was born on June 5, 1898, in the town of Fuente Vaqueros, located on Granada's Vega Plain.
The colorfulness of the rural life and family environment are factors that will affect Lorca's art life in the future. The people who filled Lorca's imagination with folk songs and tales are a grandfather who is a fan of Victor Hugo, an uncle who has published a poetry book, and another uncle who is famous for playing the bandurria (Spanish instrument) and performing jaberas; the family women (his mother, grandmother, aunts, and nannies) who adore Lorca because she had an unhealthy childhood.
The testimonies of Lorca's youth in Granada often portray a shy and introverted person. However, he doesn't come out of a small community he calls los putrefactos (the rotten ones), which he formed with a group of friends from the University of Granada, where he studied Law and Literature. Ensemble members also take on the guidance of European visitors, including well-known artists such as HG Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Rubinstein, who go on a trip to Andalusia to get exotic impressions.
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca (5 June 1898 – 19 August 1936), known as Federico García Lorca was a Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27, a group consisting mostly of poets who introduced the tenets of European movements (such as symbolism, futurism, and surrealism) into Spanish literature.
Socialist thinker Fernando de los Ríos persuaded Lorca's family to place him in a student dormitory in Madrid in 1919. This becomes the turning point in Lorca's life. Lorca establishes relationships with famous and universalized figures in various art fields such as Guillermo de Torre, José Moreno Villa, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, Rafael Alberti, Pedro Salinas and Gerardo Diego, Juan Romon Jimenez.
Federico García Lorca was a musician before he was a poet. In his youth, he was closely interested in Spanish folklore and folk tunes. Lorca's relationship with music, who defines himself as a musician before deciding to become a poet, shows itself in his later theatrical works, in which he gives a weighty place to music as a dramatic element along with poetry. Perhaps we would have known Lorca more as a musician than as a poet, had the music teacher whom she taught at the age of 19 hadn't died, or had her parents sent her to Paris to study music at her request.
The first poetry book, Impressions, and Landscapes, published in 1918, was built on the idea of the integrity of nature and the human spirit, which was one of the popular themes of that period. Nature, which he is always a good observer of, appears as a symbol in almost every poem.
For the Book of Poems, which was published in 1921 and consists of poems he wrote between 1918-1919, “In this book full of youthful fire, pain, and unmeasured passion, I present the authentic view of my teenage and youth days, those days that still connect my childhood to my very near future. These uneven pages are the heartfelt reflections of my heart and soul, painted with the details of the fluttering life that has just been born to my gaze.
Ultraismo (extremism) in Gypsy Romances, which was published in 1929 and brought him international fame, left its place for surrealism, which he met during his friendship with Dali, which included a passionate and platonic love. Surrealism also paves the way for Lorca to work through metaphorical and symbolic language, one of Lorca's favorite themes, the theme of the repression of passions and death. For his book, “Although it seems that there are different heroes in the romances, there is actually one: Granada. Although it bears the name of Gypsy, the book as a whole is the poetry of Andalusia. I said gypsy because gypsy is the most distinguished, deepest, and aristocratic element of my country" Lorca said.
He met Salvador Dali in 1923. They both live in the same dormitory at the academy. Although Lorca and Dali's union was short-lived, they wrote long letters and sent pictures and poems to each other in the years they did not meet. The titles of their letters to each other are always “My most precious treasure, my dearest, my most valuable asset”. Art experts are of the opinion that there are various forms of Lorca portraits in Dali's 12 works, including Honey is Blood is Sweet. Lorca also dedicates the Epic and Little Viennese Waltz to Salvador Dali.
Lorca went to America between 1929-30, when the first part of his Gypsy Romance poems was published and gained international fame. Some attribute this to the fact that the poet fled because of a paranoid fear that he could do nothing better after his extraordinary fame. Some associate it with Dali, who ended his friendship with him and settled in Paris because he wanted to get away because of the depression caused by his absence. Others attribute the poet to this journey to find new subjects and refresh his imagination.
He enters Columbia University, but cannot learn English. He prefers to leave the university aside and visit the city's museums and theaters. He travels to immigrant neighborhoods, especially Harlem, and is struck by jazz music, which he says is kneaded with human sensitivity and human warmth. Negroes, workers, the unemployed, university students, filthy streets, crowds of people, murders, rudeness, and brutality… All these things affect Lorca deeply. In the meantime, he writes poetry non-stop. He meets the poet Walt Whitman, a gay rights activist, and now writes poems describing this whole New York world in his style. The poems in The Poet in New York, published posthumously in 1940, convey the horror of seeing death in life in a mechanized civilization, with solid, chilling images that are put together in a striking way.
Lorca wrote his first play, The Butterfly's Crime, in 1919. Although the play was staged a year later, it did not attract attention. Mariana Pineda, written in 1925, is a historical story belonging to the geography of Granada. It is the story of a woman who was caught and executed while she was planting a flag for her revolutionary lover who fought for freedom. The play Mariana Pineda, which was staged in 1927, was staged with the decorator of Salvador Dali and the acting of Margarita Xirgu, one of the important actors of Spain, and achieved significant success.
Just before the proclamation of the Republic, he returns to his native Spain. For Lorca, this new environment is unique because of the atmosphere of freedom and the possibilities it provides. In a short time, he took his place among the ardent supporters of the Republic and the government and increasingly politicized his artistic attitude as never before. When the Republic was declared in Spain in 1931, the Ministry of Education appointed Lorca as the director of the traveling theater company La Barraca, which was founded in 1932. La Barraca is a government-funded community founded by university students. This is how the developments that brought Lorca to this day as a great playwright begin. The community plays the golden age games with the people of the countryside. The passion of these naive audiences allows Lorca to return to familiar themes such as love and honor.
The most important representative of poetic theater, Lorca wrote the first of his trilogy, Blood Wedding, in 1932, which has become a classic in theatrical art and was inspired by a newspaper report. In the play, on the day of her marriage, the bride secretly escapes with the man she loves, and the feud between the families that have been killed is rekindled. In the end, the two men kill each other. In the play, Lorca tells the fate of Spain while telling the tragedy of a woman who is stuck between her love and traditions.
In Yerma, the second book of the trilogy he wrote in 1934, Yerma is the drama of a woman who yearns for the children her husband couldn't give her, and who is too devoted to the traditions to get offspring illegally. In this game, too, there is the tragedy of the woman who is stuck between morals, customs, and desires.
He completed the last of the trilogy, Bernarda Alba's House, in 1936, two months before his death. It tells the stories of four sisters, who are held in a house of mourning by their despotic mothers, burning with feelings of hatred and lust. Lorca's characters are caught between natural law and social norms, and they encounter strict rules when they try to fulfill their desires.
The day before the night of 16-17 July 1936, Lorca, who is disturbed by the political tensions in Madrid, sets out to go to Granada, where he spent his childhood, with the advice of his friends. This journey is also his journey to death, which he frequently talks about in his poems and plays.
Lorca was only 38 years old when he was shot without trial by the fascist administration under General Franco on August 19, 1936. The real information about how he was killed is revealed in the document obtained from the police station 29 years after his death, with the initiative of his French friend Marcelle Auclair. The document states that the poet was taken to be shot after confessing. It is stated that Lorca stayed at her friends' house and was arrested there, fearing that he would be detained after two searches carried out by the police at her home. According to the document, the poet's friends tried to prevent the military commander while Lorca was arrested, but without success. Although Franco, the general of the time, said that Lorca died as a natural result of the war while he was mixing the country with the rebels, it is stated in the document that Lorca was shot after confessing, was taken by car to an area close to the place known as Fuente Grande, and was buried in a hut.
To find the burial place of Lorca, authorities dug repeatedly. The tomb thought to have been buried, was first excavated in 2009, but the bones could not be found. It was also revealed in the document that Lorca was labeled as a socialist and a freemason belonging to the Alhambra Lodge and was accused of homosexuality and heresy.