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Hugo Wolf and the operatic Grail: The search for a libretto

The pre-history of a nineteenth-century composer's first opera often required labours more arduous and frustrating, more time-consuming by far, than the work of composition itself: the search for a suitable libretto or the source from which a libretto could be fashioned. The chronicle of Beethoven's travails before work on his Schmerzenskind could begin, his rejection of plays and poets both before and after the Bouilly-Sonnleithner text of Fidelio, is not the only instance of its kind. Later composers with operatic ambitions and without a court-sponsored coterie of librettisti had an even harder time. The difficulty of locating a good text was not the only or even the principal reason for Brahms's famous quip, ‘Better to marry than to write opera’, but it was certainly a contributing factor and a stumbling block for others. For those who, unlike Wagner, did not trust their own poetic skills, the doleful refrain, ‘A good poet is hard to find’, was a leitmotif more insistent than anything in the Ring.