Lorca wanted to be a composer before he became Spain's poet
Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) led Spain's Generation of '27 with Andalusian ballads and experimental theatre. He dreamed first of a life in music, turned to writing only after his piano teacher died, and was murdered by Nationalist forces at the Civil War's start; his body has never been found.
He was born in Fuente Vaqueros, 17 kilometres west of Granada, to a landowner enriched by a sugar boom and a schoolteacher mother; all three family homes are now museums. From age eleven he took six years of piano with the composer Antonio Segura Mesa, drawing early inspiration from Debussy, Chopin and Beethoven. Only after Segura died in 1916 did he start writing, and his first prose pieces carried musical titles such as Nocturne and Sonata. His friendship with Manuel de Falla later turned Spanish folklore into his muse.
At Madrid's Residencia de Estudiantes he befriended Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. His first play, staged in 1919–20, was a verse drama about a cockroach in love with a butterfly; audiences laughed it off after four performances, a humiliation that coloured his view of theatregoers ever after. In 1922 he joined Falla to promote a festival of cante jondo, the deep song of flamenco, and in 1927 Mariana Pineda, with sets by Dalí, triumphed in Barcelona.
Gypsy Ballads, published in 1928, stylised the ballads still told in the Andalusian countryside and made him famous across the Hispanic world, though he chafed at being boxed in as a gypsy poet. Success coincided with estrangement from Dalí, who said he had rejected Lorca's advances, and the end of an affair with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén, deepening a depression sharpened by the strain of hiding his homosexuality.
A stay in New York in 1929–30 produced Poet in New York, published only in 1942. Back in Spain he wrote his best-known plays, Blood Wedding in 1932, Yerma in 1934 and The House of Bernarda Alba in 1936. The motive for his killing that August is still argued over: his sexuality, his socialism, both, or a personal feud.
Source: Federico García Lorca
