Fortner was asked by
Karl-Heinz Stroux to write incidental music for a performance of Lorca's play
Bodas de sangre in Hamburg in the early 1950s. The composer was impressed by the drama and felt that acting was not enough to "sing the tragedy to an end" ("die Tragödie zu Ende zu singen"), and decided to set longer sections to music. Fortner wrote the opera's libretto himself based on Enrique Beck's German translation of the play.
Bluthochzeit, a "literary opera" like
Alban Berg's
Wozzeck and
Lulu, is driven by the action, as the composer comments: "The compulsion of the words drives the music." He scored the work for singing and speaking parts, following the text which is at times in prose, at times in poetry. Fortner used
dodecaphony but included traditional Spanish instruments, such as
mandolins,
castanets,
tambourine and guitars.
Giselher Klebe noted in an introduction to the performance in Düsseldorf that Fortner, who was exposed to twelve-tone technique rather late in life, used the restriction of its rules to heighten expressiveness. In 1962 Fortner revised the scores of both
Bluthochzeit and his 1954 dramatic scene
Der Wald (
The Forest) and used both of them in the score for a new opera,
In seinem Garten liebt Don Perlimplin Belisa with a libretto based on another play by Garcia Lorca (
Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín). This new opera premiered on 10 May 1962 in a production by Cologne Opera at the
Schwetzingen Festival. == Roles ==