Bluthochzeit

Bluthochzeit
Opera by Wolfgang Fortner
Cologne Opera House photographed shortly before the premiere of Bluthochzeit
Description	Lyrische Tragödie in two acts
Translation	Blood Wedding
Librettist	Wolfgang Fortner
Language	German
Based on	García Lorca's Bodas de sangre, translated by Enrique Beck
Premiere	8 June 1957 (1957-06-08) Cologne Opera

Bluthochzeit (Blood Wedding) is an opera (lyrische Tragödie) in two acts by Wolfgang Fortner. The libretto, also by Fortner, is based on Enrique Beck's German translation of García Lorca's 1933 play Bodas de sangre. It premiered at the Cologne Opera on 8 June 1957.

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 Perlimplín 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 at the Cologne Opera.