In Our Time - Lorca

Episode Date: July 4, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), author of Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, who mixed the traditions of Andalusia with the avant-garde. He found his first major success with his Gypsy Ballads, although Dali, once his close friend, mocked him for these, accusing Lorca of being too conservative. He preferred performing his poems to publishing them, and his plays marked a revival in Spanish theatre. He was captured and killed by Nationalist forces at the start of the Civil War, his body never recovered, and it's been suggested this was punishment for his politics and for being openly gay. He has since been seen as the most important Spanish playwright and poet of the last century.WithMaria Delgado Professor of Creative Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of LondonFederico Bonaddio Reader in Modern Spanish at King’s College LondonAndSarah Wright Professor of Hispanic Studies and Screen Arts at Royal Holloway, University of LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, Federico Gathia Loka, 1898 to 1936, is one of the great Spanish writers of the 20th century, and his death is still a disturbing mystery.

In his poems and plays, he blended his childhood experiences in Andalothea, with the modernity and avant-garde of Madrid and Barcelona. And his rural trilogy, Blood Wedding, Yuma, and the House of Banada Alba have become some of Spain's greatest cultural exports. Yet he was one of the first writers to be executed by nationalists at the start of the Spanish Civil War, perhaps through his writing, or politics, or a family feud, or because he was gay, and his body has never been found. Women to discuss the life and works of Lorca are Federico Bandillo, Reader

in modern Spanish at King's College London. Sarah Wright, Professor of Hispanic Studies and Screen Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. And Maria Delgado, Professor of Creative Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. Maria Delgado, Loco was born in 1898. What was his family background?

Well, his family background was quite mixed. I mean, his father was a very wealthy landowner. And people often forget, because he's seen as the poet of the marginalised, of the Roma, of women, of gay men. But his father actually came from a very wealthy land-owning family. His mother was a schoolteacher. She was an educated woman,

which was quite rare at the time where not a lot of women had access to education. And he often said that he'd inherited his passion from his father and his intelligence from his mother. What was it about his father that gave him passion? He felt very strongly about social issues. A lot of the landowners at the time were very reaction. They often exploited their workers.

He learned about social justice from his father. His father didn't exploit his work. His father apparently did not exploit his workers. So I think it was the value system he inherited from his father. It was a close-knit family. He had three younger siblings, a brother, Francisco, who wrote an important book about Lorca and two younger sisters. And he grew up, not in Granada City itself, but he was born in the small town of Fuente

which is actually a village, 15 miles to the north, west of the city. And this is where he grew up loving country life. He grew up with a love of the rural, the imagery of Grenada, the lush vegetation. It was a very fertile area. And the legends, the folk ballads. So Granada, its landscape, was a really important part, a very formative influence for him. He always, he always. He always, also grew up loving theatre. He used to dress up as a priest and enact performances. He used to get the house servants to dress up and be part of these performances. He was a talented musician. He learnt the piano quite young and originally had wanted to be a pianist. His father wouldn't let him go and study full-time at the Conservatoire. But he had a love of music, of dressing up,

of performance. He owned a toy theatre, which he used to entertain his siblings and the servants with. So he grew up in a culture-loving family, a good library in the home as well, and his mother taught him to read at an early age. Can you give us some idea of the cultural drift at the time? His father seems to be anti what was thought of as the norm of the great landowners of the period. So we know about his father, or a little about his father. What was the general drift of things then? He was born in 1898 at a time where Spain was undergoing a great deal of soul searching. 1898 was the year in which Spain lost the last vestiges of her empire, Cuba and the Philippines. And he was growing up at a time when there was a lot of identity crisis for Spain,

wondering what kind of a nation it wanted to be. The 19th century had been a time of unrest. There had been civil unrest, a new... urban working class that were unhappy at the conditions in which they were held. They'd been the Napoleonic invasion, three civil conflicts, a very weak monarchy, and periods of military control. So we're talking about a really uneasy political situation. What you did have really at the beginning of the 20th century was the beginnings of a new intellectual movement that Lorca identified with the generation of 1898, of which the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, the dramatist

Vain clan, who was an influence on Lorka, the poet Antonio Machado, who wrote a great poem about Lorca's death in 1936. These were influential figures talking about the importance of culture in renovating Spain's sense of self. But his parents always looked after him financially, so there are no troubles on that front. No, in fact, his father bankrolled a number of the early editions of his work, and it wasn't really until the mid-1930s,

until his work was staged in Argentina, that he became financially independent and could actually send money home to his family. So he was in a very fortunate position where his family supported his artistic endeavours. Thank you. Federico Vanadio, how did he start to find his voice? Okay, well, his first collection of poems

was a collection entitled, quite simply, Libro de Poemas, which simply means a book of poems. And in some introductory notes to the volume, he says that the poetry is a faithful reflection of his adolescence,

the passion and torture of his adolescence. And I think that in this early poetry, as a young man, he is looking quite simply, I think, to express himself. But the interesting thing about that collection is that it's also engaging

with the aesthetic trends of the day, with the dominant aesthetic, which tends to towards impersonal art. So on the one hand, you have a young man who wants to talk about himself, about growing pains and about his engagement with the world, about his emotions.

But on the other hand, you also have a young man who wants to become a poet and learn his trade as a poet. Do you have any examples? I see verses before me. Well, there's one example in particular from Libro deia poems, from Book of Poems,

in which a number of poems are about the heart. So the heart becomes a subject. It becomes an object of interrogation. rather than some lyrical outpouring. So, for instance, this is from a poem entitled Desaio, which translates as desire. And he writes,

"'Solo tu' turazone caliente and nada more. My paraiso, a campo sin ruis, "'signor, "'any liras, with a rio discreeto and a fente fia.'" Which translates as, "'only your hot heart, nothing more. "'My paradise are filled without nightingales or liars with a little fountain and a discreet stream.

And what we can see from these lines is that the heart becomes the object of his inquiry here. And he talks about this paradise, maybe this ideal place, which is a field without 90 girls, without that nightingale songs. He then wrote poem of deep song and gypsy ballads. He was fascinated by the Roma way of life, which was not fashionable, but it was in his neighbourhood. and he was fascinated by these people, they're dancing. Can you just say a little about that?

So if we think about a poem of the Deep Song, for example, he began writing the poems of that collection, at the same time as he was organising a competition of Flamenco Deep Song with the well-known composer Manuel de Afaya, which took place in 1922. And he's very interested in his local culture. He's very interested in the traditions of Andalusia, and the place where he was brought up.

But you can even see, even in Poem of the Deep Song, the impact of the dominant aesthetic of the day, which is a tendency towards impersonal art, or even art that has art as its subject. So the subject of poem of the Deep Song is actually in the Deep Song itself. He does depict performers in it, but he actually tries to chart out through his poetry

the structures and forms of Deep Song. Yeah, and he called the technical volume Gypsy Ballads. Have you got a short piece from? a gypsy belly before you? I do. So this is a couple of extracts from the La Monja Hittana, which translates as the Gypsy nun, and I'll read this out. It's Silencio

de Calimirto, Malbas in Las Yerbas in Las Yerbas-Finnas and a little further on, Ke bien borda, con que graca over la telepachisa, she could boardar flores of his fantasy, which translates as silence of myrtle and lime,

Mallow's bloom in meadow grasses The nun embroidered gilly flowers on a flaxen cloth. How finely she embroideres, and with such grace, she is longing to embroider flowers of her fantasy on the flaxen cloth. Thank you very much. It's nice to hear the language, isn't it? Great. Sarah, Sarah, right.

How would you describe Lorca's first plays, such as the Butterfly's Evil Spell? Well, 1994 saw the publication of the unpublished theatre of Lorca's Youth, So we were able to read fragments of plays such as Christ, which was about a teenage Christ, which was rather surprising for us at the time. But we know that the Butterfly's Evil Spell was his first production.

So in a way we kind of think of that as being his early theatre. The Butterfly's Evil Spell was produced at the Islava Theatre in Madrid in 1920. And Lorca had read a poem to his friend Gregorio Martinez-Sierra, which was all about a cockroach who fell in love with the butterfly. And Lorca liked to read aloud his work, his poetry, just as we've heard from Federico there, and also his theatre. And Gregorio really liked this poem and said, please make it into a play, and we're going to put it on the stage. It's a story about insects. You sort of imagine them in the field as if they're underneath a magnifying glass.

And it's about unrequited love. Unfortunately, the play was a complete flop and there were jeers from the crowd from the audience members there were calls to pour insecticide on the woodcutter By this time as you've alluded he was in Madrid he'd gone to

Saltu University of school in Grenada he either wasn't any good at law he didn't want to do law and they're moving into Madrid which is much more one can say enlightened liberal education across the board Surrealism psychology and that's where as we're going to start

he met Buonuel and Dali. But his early plays like Don Perlimplin, still drawing on older traditions. We've heard a little of the older traditions. Can you give us some idea of what he was putting in his plays from what he called his older traditions? Yes, Don Perlimpleen draws on two early traditions.

First of all, puppet plays, he was very interested in from his youth, and also a sort of comic strip from the 18th century called the Alleluia, which had stock figures, so there was Don Perlind Plain who was a stop figure, a bit like Mr. Punch. And he was the old man who fell in love with young, glamorous Belisa, who unfortunately committed adultery on their wedding night.

So it's a very slight piece. It's considered a minor work, but it has great complexity because it's all about the difference between carnal desire and a sort of metaphysical love. Don Perlind Plin creates a fantasy figure of the young man in the Red Cay. in order to satisfy Belisa's desires. She falls in love with this young man, and when Pelimpleen stabs himself at the end of the play,

Belisa is left forever searching for this wonderful young man in the Red Cape. As I understood, he got in with, or was to become a friend of Dali and Bunweil, and he was reading this play aloud to them when Bunweil told him in words that perhaps can't be repeated on this programme, that he thought very little of this play, and Darlay later agreed. Now, he's in with these two extraordinary,

people. He himself was an extraordinary person. What was happening there? Yeah, so he was reading aloud his works, and I think this was around 1926 when he decided to read Domperlimpleen to them. They absolutely hated it. But I think what was going on there was a split, really, between what they saw as being the folkloric elements that were present in Lorca and what they wanted, what they were interested in, which was the avant-garde. Can you take a bit further through that, Maria, this split? Between the different Lorca's. I mean, I think, One of the things that Sarah's alluded to is the fact that Lorca was working on a lot of things at the same time. He took in an awful lot of influences.

He was very influenced by local kind of forms of art, but also surrealism, which came to Madrid via Paris and through the Residencia de Studiantes, the student boarding house, which was modelled on an Oxbridge college system, with a library that he lived in for about eight years in Madrid. and there is where he met Buneuel and Dali. Bunao had arrived in 1917, Dali in 1922. They all hung out together. Lorca was closer to Buneo than he was to...

Sorry, Lorka was closer to Dali than he was to Buneo. And Buneo was also very close to Dali, and eventually that's where the schism between them came. But part of that... You mean we're talking about symbol jealousy here? We are boys behaving badly, I think, is part of it. So let's not talk about boys. These guys are all right.

But I think what was important was the fact that Bunewell and Dali didn't really appreciate and understand Lorca's interest in these folk forms of art. And Don Perelin is part of that, but even Blood Wedding and Gypsy Ballets are about thinking through Spanish indigenous traditions. And they felt Bunei and Dali felt that he should be forging forward with Dardaiism and surrealism.

And you do see this, a number of his early plays, often not complete. He began work on an awful lot of works where we've only got fragments, a page, a page and a half, often feature characters with mutilated arms. The language of surrealism is also there in Lorca's early drawings, again, showing the influence of Darley on his aesthetic. Well, you would have thought, Federica and Nadia, When he went to New York, his enthusiasm of modernism might have been sharpened. That doesn't seem to have happened.

No, if you look at the letters he first wrote home to his family, he talks about his first site of New York, and he seems to speak very positively about these, you know, wondrous skyscrapers before him. And he says they are the highest achievement of the human soul. But, I mean, even though he had an interesting time, and he was well connected to a Columbia University and he had people to look after him.

And when you look at the poems themselves, what he conveys through his poetry is the horror of progress, the horrors of modernity. What specifically? Well, I suppose you see a simple opposition between, on the one hand, the concrete jungle, if you like.

But you just said he thought this was aesthetically fantastic. He did. In his letters, that's what he communicated. but in the poems by a contrast, New York comes across as a very oppressive place, which is in stark contrast to a nature, which he sees as a fitting place for a human beings to a dwell in, whereas he sees New York as very oppressive.

I mean, he was there during the Wall Street crash as well, and so his criticism is also directed at capitalism more broadly and interest in money over the soul, if you like, over a human beings. Sarah, He went to Cuba and, as it were, disappeared in Cuba. There's not much known about it, except possibly by the three of you, about what happened to him in Cuba. But when he came back to Spain,

A, had it changed in ways which are relevant to Lorca? And B, did he feel he'd learned anything by going to the new world? Yeah, so apart from going to jazz bars at New York, he also went to see off-Broadway plays, which really he found very enriching. When he went to Cuba, it was very different from the alienation. that he'd felt in New York. He felt that it was very like Spain. He said, if I get lost, look for me in Cuba or in Andalusia. So he felt very much at home there. And despite the fact that he was staying with a family there called the Loinath family, he would just disappear. Because at that time, it was a sort of playground for tourists in Cuba. And he could go off. And we think probably explore sexual liaisons. Can we just bring it to the surface now? He was gay. Did he ever conceal it? Was it a criminal offence in Cuba and in Spain?

to be gay or it was just a sin or both? Yes, I think that's right. I think he struggled with his sexuality. Yes, it was, yes. It was possibly different in the Second Republic, but certainly under Primo de Rivera, you know, there were very tight controls. And yes, he struggled, I think, through his work with his homosexuality as well. And I think, you know, that's a very important theme to pick up on. So he's in Cuba, he comes back to Spain, he looks at Spain and what does he think? So while he'd been away in Spain, there were lots of changes taking place.

Spain had seen the fall of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the establishment of a liberal leftist second Spanish republic, led by Manuel Athania. This was a very progressive time for Spain when they thought that what would be interesting would be to have mass literacy programs to deal with. illiteracy in the villages. And part of this, something called the teaching missions or missiones pedagogicas, was a theatre troupe called La Barraca, which was to be led by Lorca himself. So this was an itinerant group of players who would set up a platform and a stage on a lorry. They were all dressed in boiler suits, and they would take their plays, usually golden age plays from Spanish tradition, out to the villages and to the masses out there. And this was subsidised possibly by his father still?

No, in fact, he was subsidised by the government. And how did that do? I mean, did he teach him a lot? Did he reach a lot of people? Well, he felt that this was part of social regeneration. This is where his true theatre lay, because he felt that theatre was not for the bourgeoisie. It was not for people who were frivolous

who went for entertainment, but it could really reach people in important ways. And he saw the la Barraka as being a very important part of that. Was it censored this theatre? It wasn't at the time, but so it was very much encouraged at the time, although the right-wing press were very much against it. And it continued right until the CEDA, the Conservative Alliance, swept to power in 1933, and then it was withdrew funding and it was disbanded.

Maria Delgado, in the 1930s, Larko wrote three plays, which are the bedrock of his reputation. Blood Wedding, Yerma and the House of Bernada Alba. They've been likely to Greek tragedy. Can you tell us a bit of something about those plays? They're all plays with women at the centre. And I think this is one of the other things that marks Lorca out. A lot of the dramatists at the time were writing plays about men,

about the male experience, about male power. Lorca gave a different glance to theatre. And I think part of it, it's often said that he wrote so many plays for women because he was gay and he empathised with their marginalised position within society. Remember that women were not given the vote until the Second Republic in

the early 1930s. So we're talking about a disenfranchised population. Obviously he was inspired by his mother very erudite, his mother taught him to read, his mother encouraged education in himself, his brother and his sisters. But also

the most important theatre figures of the time were women. specifically a Margata Shigua, a very important actress. She was the Sarah Bernhardt of Spain. And she had a hugely influential theatre company that toured not only in Spain but in Latin America. And it was in Latin America, specifically Argentina but also Chile and Cuba,

where the real money from theatre came. And he first approached her in the mid-1920s with his play Mariana Paneda, a play about a woman revolutionary of Granada. And the trilogy is very much influenced, I think, by that early play, Mariana Pineda, a woman, a radical woman at its centre. What he does with the trilogy is write plays about the predicament of desiring women.

Women are sexual agents, women who desire men, who may not necessarily be the figures that are arranged for them in marriage. We're talking about arranged marriage at the time being very, very typical. And these are women who fight with agency against what society has decreed they ought to be. And death is usually the result. Death is usually result. As in Greek tragedy, there are often women where they're fighting against, in inverted commas, fate.

And their fate is to marry the people or the figure that the family has chosen for them. There's often a rival lover that they're seeing in a clandestine way, which is the case in the House of Bernardo Alba with the youngest daughter Adela, who's actually secretly seeing her elder sister's fiancé. And you see it also in blood wedding. who is betrothed to a bridegroom, but actually she's in love with an ex-boyfriend Leonardo who's married to a cousin of hers.

So that tension between love and honour, which is so fundamental to the Golden Age canon of Savantes and Loper de Vega, is very much something that he takes with him into his tragedies. Did he take the audiences with him in those plays? Not necessarily. I mean, not all of them were produced in his life, lifetime. So if you think Blood Wedding, he wasn't happy with the first production of Blood Wedding in 1933.

He felt that it was played too much as comedy and that it became about the bride's predicament, where he actually saw the mother who's holding up the social order, who wants to protect her son as the lead character. In Yerma, it actually provoked, which was produced in 1934, it provoked a riot in the theatre, a bit like Playboy of the Western World, because it was seen as unthinkable. to the right to have a woman who actually kills her husband in the play. Because he wouldn't give her the child you wanted. Because he's unable to give her the child. He's not enabled, he doesn't want to because he prepares money.

Well, that's one of the readings that's possible for the play. One of the other things is Yerma in Spanish means barren. So in fact, she could be barren. So I think there's ambiguities in the play. I think this is one of the things that makes him such a great dramatist, that the plays do not have easy readings. and I think that that ambiguity, he often has allegorical titles

for the characters and for the plays. The House of Bernard Raleb were obviously taken from the House of Atreus, the lineology around Greek tragedy being very, very evident. Thank you very much. That was terrific. Ferre Rico, how do the tensions in the plays that have been discussed reflect those in Spanish society at the time? Is he talking directly to society, even though they're not getting out to as many audiences as he would wish?

You know, I think that the themes of the play resonate with the polarised politics of the day. They stretch back to his early work. He's always been interested in a kind of tension between freedom and limits and between expressions and limits on expressions. So whether it was, as I mentioned before, you know, the tension between him wanting to express himself and then the dominant artistic trends of the day, which were quite impersonal and kind of quashed the lyrical voice,

or whether it be the social structures that then oppress the individual, as in the plays that Maria has just mentioned, love and desire versus the impositions of a family or a social order on the individual. I think these are the themes that are current throughout its work. Even in New York, again, it is about the individual versus this dehumanized world. These themes resonate, but I think they've always been there in one form or another right throughout his work. Sarah, how does he combine his instincts for folklore with the avant-garde? Specifically in the Royal Trilogy, yeah, perhaps.

Well, if we think of a play like Blood Wedding, the blood of the title is very full of Andalusian local references. the blood symbolises passionate desire on the one hand. It's also to do with the violence of the long-running feud that's in that play between the two families. But it's also to do with bloodline and this idea of Spanish honour. And there's some sort of nothing more folkloric than that. But there are other elements in that play.

Do we really mean Roma? I think I am thinking that in this context, yeah. If we think about a character like this, the moon. Now the moon is very much to do with Lorca's conception of folklore features very prominently in the gypsy ballads, for example. But in

this play is a non-naturalistic character. It's androgynous, a bit like Teresius's from T.S. Eliot's, the wasteland is an all-seeing figure. So the moon is a character who spreads light through the forest and seeks out the lovers. So we've got

this sort of duality between the folkloric elements on the one hand, and the avant-garde and the other. And we even see that with the House of Bernada-Alba, which has been praised for its realism and sobriety. Because Loga said that this should be a photographic document. A lot of people have said this is about mimeticism. But in fact, we could also see it as being to do with visual distortions.

So there's a really interesting visual policing in this play, with all the young women of the house looking at each other to make sure that they're all behaving well, on the one hand. There are never any men seen in this play. They're only imagined. The only, you know, the harvesters that come in, the symbols of hyper-masculency or fertility,

they all take place off-stage. And then to come back to the female characters, we have the grandmother of the House of Bernad Alba, who's my favourite character in that play. She's a rather pitiful figure who's dressed in a night dress, but she thinks it's her wedding dress, and she's carrying a lamb as if it's a newborn baby, and says that she wants to get married and live by the sea.

These are all slightly avant-garde distortions that we could read into that play. Can we just come back to you to finish up something that was implicit in what you were saying, Federico? Given that Spain was very conservative, was his gayness in itself a source for his reaction against that, you could have that word against the conservatism? That's a good question. I think what we see in his work is a struggle within himself. I mean, there are those that actually say that Locke himself was quite conservative in his outlook. So what was actually in play here was sort of internal struggles about his own sexuality.

I'm not absolutely sure about the extent to which his own sexuality actually shaped his reaction broadly to the politics of the day to his society. It must have had some influence. But as I said, I think that he was just very broadly interested in any form, I suppose, of oppression of the individual and of individual desire. So it must have had some impact, but I don't think it was his only concern. Maria, at the time of these plays, he'll be doing other writings as well, being told by the three of you that he's writing all sorts of something at the same time. What sort of force was he as an intellectual writer in Spain? We know a little anyway about Darlene and Bernouil. What do we know about him?

He became increasingly a celebrity in his lifetime. He hung out with bull fighters. In his 30s. In his 30s. I mean, it was really, in terms of his poems, the gypsy ballads, the Romanzero Hittano, that made his reputation. And in terms of theatre,

Blood Wedding and Yermann, not the House of Bernadur Alba, because he only read that to friends a month and a half before he was killed. But already those plays were circulating. Blood Wedding had been. been published. His earlier plays were being restaged. So one of his puppet plays, the Shoemaker's wonderful wife, received a high-profile production with Margarita Shigou. So he was being endorsed by the

kind of leading cultural figures. He had close friends who were poets and novelists, Juan Ramon Jimenez, one of the leading novelists at the time, took him under his wing. He was photographed. He was in the newspapers, attending the premiers of his plays and attending bullfights. So he was seen as a celebrity in his lifetime. Did he enjoy that? I think he loved it. I mean, it was often said of him. Bunoz said that he loved being the center of attention.

His room in the Residencia de Studientes in Madrid was one of the central places in the institution. There was always a party going on. He was always the center of attention. He loved being the center of attention. So he was an extremely exuberant personality. Matched with that, however, of course, was his depression. We know, for example, that when he was in New York, he suffered depression.

So those polar opposites are very present. They're present in his writing, and they were evidenced in his life also. From what you've said and what you've written, Sarah, his plays would on the surface at that time, as time goes on when people get the hang of them, be very difficult to perform. So are we talking about a series of elegant flops? This is what Larker thought. So while some people might think that his avant-garde works as stepping stones to the Royal Trilogy, which are sort of full-blooded plays,

Lorca conceived of his work very differently, but he said the public just isn't ready for the kind of theatre that I would like to do. The kind of theatre that he wanted to do was the public from 1930, as soon as five years pass, and a fragment that we have called Play Without a Title. The public specifically is about, they talk about, Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo is played by a man of 30, and Juliet is played by a much younger man.

There's a dialogue between the director and another character about what theatre should be. Should it be theatre of the open air, or should it be theatre beneath the sand? And theatre beneath the sand speaks truth. What does it mean by beneath the sand? I think it's all to do with a sort of speaking the truth, but also to do with the kind of the ritual arena that goes back to Greek trance. tragedy for example. What do you mean beneath the sand? It's never really explained, but I think

that's probably as close as I can get to it. What's hidden? What is under the ground that we have to really dig down deep to discover and this idea of things not being obvious. I mean, there's lots of wordplay and gameplay in Lodka's works. And the surreal works that Sarah's alluded to, like the public, as five years pass or when five years pass,

play without a title. They're also quite playful, funny plays. They've got moments of great humour. It's often forgotten because of the rural trilogy being dominated by tragedy that he was actually a comic dramatist also. Did Dalian Bunwell ever take him as seriously as he

wanted to be taken? No. They ridiculed him. They created An Shanandaloo, which he took as an affront. He felt that their first film... You better tell listeners in Shana a little bit more about Shanand Loo than before you say why it's in a front. And Shanand DeLoo was a film that Dali and Bunuel crafted and directed in Paris.

And Bunoz and Dali never said it was about Lorka, but he took it as an insult. He felt he was the Andalusian dog who was being ridiculed in the film. And he, so it wasn't until much later. Dali, of course, in one of his final interviews, talked about the friendship with Lorkas, being one of the great and most important relationships of his life. But I think in the early 30s, Bunewell and Dali felt that he was too associated with the rural Spain, the backward Spain, the Spain of folklore, the Spain of the Golden Age tradition to be genuinely avant-garde.

In what way could he be regarded as political at this time, Mariko? He didn't make many political pronouncements, but I think that the nearer we get to 1936 artists are having to take sides. So he was quite reticent. But I think he did sign up to political manifestos of the left, and there are some interviews where he made some pronouncements that could be understood as sympathetic to the left-wing cause. But then amongst his friends, there were, you know, his friends that, you know, there were right-wingers and left-wingers.

Apparently, he was even a friend of Jose Primo de Rivera. You know, I can imagine Lorca not wanting to be dragged into the politics. I think he was somebody that did crave and thrive in stability. But like all others, I think that at some point he was made to, take sides or at least to pronounce things that made it seem that he was taking one side over the other. Do you agree with that? Yes, I think

that's right. But there are other ways that Loka was perhaps political. We know that he wrote, for example, the ballad of the Civil Guard, which was very critical of the Civil Guard at the time. And perhaps through La Barraca, which was seen as being a very kind of left-wing force. So there were

ways in which he was sort of being positioned on the left. Also, his his statements about Granada, for example, he said that I feel very close to the Roma community. I feel very close to its background in Arabic tradition. All of these things kind of positioned him in certain ways, I think. And then almost suddenly he disappeared in 1936. Can you give us what we know about that?

We know very little on one level. We know that on the 23rd of June, he read the House of Bernardo Alba to Friends in Madrid. It had a very good reception. He was optimistic. it would soon be staged by Margherita Shigou. He left for Grenada quite suddenly on the 13th of July, and Bunewell told us he was tense and frightened.

He left after a number of assassinations, one of a left-wing military lieutenant and the second of a right-wing politician, Calvo Soelho. On the 17th of July, of course, Franco stages Cudatan, his troops rise up, and Grenada falls very quickly. It's a conservative situation. city, Grenada, so it falls on the 20th of July. Remember that Lorca had talked of Granada as having the worst middle class in the world, a meddling middle class, and that didn't endear him

to those who'd taken command in Granada. He sought his brother-in-law, who was the mayor of Granada, Manuel Montesinos, was executed in early August, and a few days later, he sought refuge in the house of his friend, the poet Luis Rosales. Two of Luis's brothers were members of the Falange, which was the fascist party of Spain, founded by Primo de Rivera, who was also alleged to have been a friend of Lorca, so he thought he would be safe there.

But of course, the right in Spain, the party that made up the rebel or nationalist forces, was made up of different elements of the right. So a group from the Seda came and took him away, arrested him, and took him to the civil government building in the centre of Grenada. Two days later, he was taken to a village to the north of the city and he was shot somewhere between the village of Vithner and Al-Farvar with three others, schoolteacher and two bullfighters and thrown into a pit. I can't even call it a grave

because it wasn't a proper grave, a pit. And his body lies, it is thought, somewhere in that Ravine on the outskirts of Granada and it's not been found to this day. Among 120,000 disappeared at the time. What was it thought of, what was the reaction to that at the time, Federico? Well, you know, amongst writers and artists, there was complete outrage and Lorka became a martyr figure for Republicans and for the left and it caused international outrage as well. I think there's also another aspect. When we look back at his work, it almost seems as if Lorka had foreseen his own death.

So there's also a narrative around this. kind of foresight that Holorka had. He had in, I think he's in 1934, he'd written an elegya, a lament to a bullfighter, Ignathio Sanchez Mejiaz, who had died in the bullring. And the reflections of death in that poem have almost been seen as, not only as in as, in as, Lorca's morbid fascination with death, but also, in a sense, some kind of premonition of his own demise. How did his death affect his reputation? Well, during the Franco regime, he was barely mentioned. I mean, Gerald Brennan, the Irish writer, talks about going to try and find his grave and nobody wanting to talk about it because he was part of, he was identified with the Republican side. And of course, the whole thing was that they were silenced. Those people were, those voices were silenced. So it wasn't until, it was really in Latin America. The House of Bernardo Alba was first premiered there in 1945 where he was canonized. So in the Spanish speaking world, he was canonized through Spanish America and through the beginnings of translations that, in most.

emerged in the 40s, 50s, 60s that really cemented his reputation. It wasn't until the mid-60s that his plays were really produced in large-scale theatres in Spain. Part of it was his family were too scared to authorise productions. And part of it was that there was

a kind of lessening of some of the censorship regulations, which allowed his work to be staged. Franco's Spain, of course, had very clear censorship regulations. So it wasn't until the 60s that there was loosening of what was permitted to be staged. And a play like Yerma, which had inspired riots on its first performance in 1934, could be staged.

And I think it's interesting that it was, I think, Franco's wife or Franco's daughter actually attended the premiere or an early performance of Yerma in the 1960s in Madrid. So it was a very tentative reappropriation of Lorka that came in the 60s. Franco also sought to disassociate himself from any culpability for Lorca's death. Lorka's death was referred to as an accident of war and that's what his death certificate. Death certificate which was issued in 1940. He said he died of war wounds.

Well, that's not true. But that's not true. He was shot. He was shot because of his, likely, his Republican affiliations or perhaps because he was gay or because he'd offended the right or the middle classes in Granada. legacy now, the three of you, starting with you, Hed Rico. His legacy is, I mean, apart from anything else, just reading his work, he just creates wonderful metaphors in his poems. And also he described many of his plays as poetry in three

dimensions. And so, you know, I think part of his legacy is the verse that he has left us, which is wonderful. He's the most translated writer from the Spanish language. I mean, that tells you something about his impact. His poems have been set to song by major artist Leonard Cohen, for example, the great Flamenco fusion artist Camarond de la Isla, the clash wrote a song about him. Nick Cave has talked about the importance of Duende, that term that he used to describe the thrill of the live,

the passion of artistic creation. His plays have been adapted to opera, to film, to ballet. He's spawned biopics. He's referenced in Almodovar films. There's statues to him all over the world. I'm wondering if there's anything but Sarah to add. I mean, I think it's true that Lorka still remembered because of the circumstances of his death

and he's a very potent symbol for the search that's ongoing at the moment for the victims of the Spanish Civil War. However, it's important that we distance Lorka a little bit from his death when we're interpreting his work so that we can read into it the richness that's important there, I think. Well, thank you very much. That was a whirlwind. Thank you very much, Sarah, right? Federico Bonadillo and Maria Delgado.

We take our annual break now and we'll be back on the 19th of September with Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Hope you can join us. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I think it would be interesting to talk about Duende. It's something that's very associated with Lorca. So Duende is, on the one hand, a little sprite figure.

but he's also a feeling that one can presence when watching a flamenco dancer or listening to deep song. And we heard from Federico that Lorco was involved in a Deep Song festival in 1922. But by 1933 in Buenos Aires, he's giving this lecture about the theory and play of Duende. So a kind of artistic spirit that's released when he's watching a flamenco dancer or listening to Deep Song. and then somehow becomes communicated to the audience. The audience can feel dwindy as well. It's a very difficult thing to understand. I don't know whether my colleagues can help me out here with this,

but it's something that's important to an understanding of Lork as well. So would you like to have a go? I call it the thrill of the live. I mean, Nick Cave writes about it. There's something about being in the room when an amazing musician is performing or hearing an extraordinary performer in, again, King Lear or, you know, or blood wedding, that something hits you in the stomach.

Something makes you tinge inside. That's Duende. And it's an emotion. It's something very, very powerful and quite difficult to define, but it's there. It's in the gut. I think we have to remember that Lorka loved reciting his poetry. So, live performance, I mean, not only in, I mean, he also acted in, he was present in some of his plays, wasn't he, as well? I mean, he loved performance. And so Duende is as a way for him also to articulate the thrill of performance for him,

whether it be the nerves or the passion, and what happens in that unpredictable moment of performance. And the relationship with an audience, there's something about the communion with an audience that's fundamental to Duende. That's why I talk about it as a thrill of the live. That live encounter there, there's an electricity that you know is there. It's so difficult to define what that. that is, but you can kind of feel it, and that's what Dwenday is.

Yeah, I think that's right, but he also talks about an awareness of death in this lecture, which is kind of difficult for us to understand, but I think that's taking us back to the difference between the theatre of the open air and the theatre beneath the sand. So there's that awareness of death when we feel most alive, and he hopes to kind of capture something of that. There's something about the unrepeatability of performance that he's capturing there in that idea of Dwende.

The ephemerality of it, performance is. there one instance and then it disappears and I think that's where the death comes from. It's there in the moment. Then it's gone, you can't capture it. You can't write it down. The play script is just a trace of it but it's a very poor trace of that moment of liveliness.

I mean, that is something about the, it also relates to some of the subject matter of song, but also another reference point for him is the ball fight. So as a performance you get to that, you know, it is a matter of life and death and so that for him is a

a crucial reference point as well. I'd like to have heard more about there wasn't time of the relationship between Dali and... I didn't ask the questions because you're off on a different direction, Dali and Buenwell and him. Well, Dali references Buneuel

and Lorka in a lot of his paintings, but especially Lorka. So there's a number of Dali's paintings where he fuses his own face with that of Lorka. So honey is sweeter than water, for example, a a painting from 1927, a still life by moonlight.

So there's a lot of referencing of Lorca's visage is his face. And Lorca, of course, paints Dali. It's often forgotten that Lorka, in addition to being a musician, and there are recordings of him playing the piano to La Argentinita singing Spanish ballads, Spanish songs. It's not bad. You know, it's not bad. The digitally remastered copy is better than some of the earlier ones.

that the Lorca scholars drew on in the 60s and 70s. He was a very decent pianist. He could have been a professional pianist, but his father didn't want him to become a professional performer. But I think that relationship was fundamental, especially to Lorca. Lorca, of course, fell out with Dali not long after he tried to seduce him.

Apparently not for the first time. Dali tried to seduce Lorca. No, Lodka tried to seduce Dali. And we know that their correspondence a lot of it has been lost. Lost or burnt? We don't know. I mean, lost in inverted commas.

I didn't see the inverted commas. Yeah. So, you know, it doesn't exist. So a lot of it is subject to conjecture. Bunuel, of course, writes a great deal about Lorca in his biography, his autobiography, My Last Breath. And he talks about what Lorca represented. He called him his own masterpiece. He said, I didn't really care that much for his own.

for his work, but I felt as a personality, he was one of the most extraordinary people I ever met. Yeah, and we talked about Anshan Andalou, this film script, but Lorca obviously suffered a bit from this relationship that he had with Bunuel and Ali, and he may have reciprocated by writing his own film script called Trip to the Moon,

which recalls Meliers' title, obviously, Trip to the Moon, but it's very different in tone. It's a sort of metamorphosis with lots of violence, in the jury, lots of male nudes in there. And it wasn't actually made into a film until the 1980s by Frederick Amat. So never made into a film during Lorca's own lifetime. When the general knowledge came out about him being gay,

when was that, and was it an announcement that changed things in his reputation? I mean, for many years, the family denied he was gay. I mean, a number of poems came out in the 19th. 1980s, the sonnets of dark love were published in 1986. And it was very clear that they were dedicated to and about a male lover. But for a long time, his most explicitly homosexual work was not published. It was not staged.

The public, which is a play that deals with homosexual love, gay love, wasn't produced until 1986 for the first time. So the family or the estate kept a lid on a lot of his more openly gay work until the restoration of democracy in Spain. So it was well known because lovers had spoken about their relationships with Lodgar. It was well known from his friends. But the family did not admit it, and it was something that was just not talked about. In the family, but most people around, I mean, presumably,

artistic family was rather bigger than his own family and they knew about it. They did know about it and a number of his friends, Luis Ternuda for example, the poet who spent time in the UK after the Civil War broke out was one of his gay friends who spoke

about it. So it was known but it just wasn't talked about and I think it really wasn't until democracy in Spain that it became something that could openly be discussed and of course there was Paul Binding's book about the gay law which sought to read his work through queer studies and gay iconography.

So the gay lorca, the queer lorca, came much, much later than the avant-garde or the surrealist lorca or the folkloric lorca. Yes, and you spoke about the sonnets of dark love being published in the 80s, and they were published with a cover that had female nude on the front. So it was as if the reader was being encouraged to imagine that these were poems. directed to a woman rather than to a man, which kind of brings us back to what I was saying with the public, where you have Romeo being played by a man and Juliet being played by a man as well,

which of course goes back to the kind of Shakespearean tradition of men playing all the roles, but at the same time it's about love between men being hidden. But the thing is what is that a lot of his poetry is not explicit, you know, say there does make explicit reference and so much of it is metaphorical or symbolic. And so it's kind of open to different readings. And for one reason or another, the queer reading has come, as Maria said,

much later. So that partly explains, I think, the tardiness, I suppose, of the arrival of more explicitly homosexual readings of his work. But he's now accepted in toto as the person he was in Spain. I think there's always something very slippery about Lorca. Lorka lied a great deal in his letters, or he was economical with the truth. He would send letters to his family saying, I'm having a great time, I'm really enjoying myself in New York. New York is wonderful. And yet he told friends that he was suffering a profound sense of anxiety and loss and depression. So that Lorka, you know, one has to understand that that playful quality of Lorka is there in the many Lorkas that are constructed through his correspondence. It makes it very difficult to say Lorka was this or Lorka was that. There's an awful lot of slippage. There's a lot of, there's something very unsettling about Lorka, something quite unknowable about Lorka. I think it's there in his writing.

There's lots of gaps. There's lots of absences. There's lots of things that can't be fixed down. I think it's one of the things that make him such an important writer. It's very difficult to say he represents this one thing. As Federi Konsera said, that those poems and those plays are subject to a great number of readings. And I think that's one of the reasons he's such a canonical and classical writer is because he continues to signify different things to different generations. I think our producer is pacing at the door.

Does everyone want tea? To your coffee? I love a coffee. Tea. Coffee, tea. Tea. All right, actually, I've got water. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced. by Simon Tillotson.

Oh, sorry to interrupt your content consumption, but can I quickly suggest a podcast you might like? It's called Grownup Land. Every week comedian Heidi Regan, podcaster Ned Sedgwick, if that is even a job. Syrian Dreamboat, Steve Alley and me, comedian Sophie Duker, are joined by a brilliant guest to discuss the bewildering pursuit of adulthood. We talk sex, jobs, rejection, jealousy, sex, all with help from BBC Radio 4. That's the Grown Up Land podcast. Make sure you subscribe on BBC Sounds.

Thank you.