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Blood Wedding, premiered by Federico García Lorca in 1933 and inspired by a real crime that took place in Níjar, transforms the story of an impossible love and a rivalry between families into a tragedy of mythical dimensions. Wolfgang Fortner adapted the play into an opera in 1957, combining spoken word and song, twelve-tone music, Expressionism and Andalusian musical roots. His score heightens the ritualistic, poetic and profoundly dramatic nature of Lorca’s universe.

The work confronts desire with social convention, and individual freedom with archaic family structures. The Bride’s escape with Leonardo breaks an order founded on blood ties, property, marriage and gender roles, ultimately leading to the deaths of Leonardo and the Bridegroom. Fate, violence, sexuality and death thus take on an ancestral and sacrificial dimension.

Our staging takes this conflict as its starting point, creating a symbolic, hermetic space from which there is no escape. Three houses made of metal mesh, nested like matryoshka dolls within a fourth enclosed perimeter, represent the family clans, but also the social prison that confines the characters, particularly the women. Through movement, light and transparency, these structures are transformed into houses, forest, labyrinth and, finally, the monumental house of the Mother. An austere, timeless aesthetic, costumes rooted in the rural world and references to ancestral folklore seek to reveal the tragic heart of Lorca’s work: a society that represses desire and turns transgression into violence and sacrifice.