[scraps] Litany

[Cole Miller]

> He combed the literature of the Western world, reading works by
> Theodor Körner, Heinrich Heine, Shakespeare, Detlev von Liliencron,
> Carlo Gozzi, Maurice Maeterlinck, Eugène Scribe, Franz Grillparzer,
> Gerhart Hauptmann, and Heinrich von Kleist, not to mention a multitude
> of minor works totally forgotten today. But he could find nothing
> acceptable, and his frustration grew. It never occurred to him to ask
> himself why his quest was so difficult. The truth was that he had from
> the start drastically reduced his chances of success by rejecting in
> advance whole categories of literature, such as, for example, all
> tragedies, realistic or naturalistic works, works expressing religious
> views that were too conventional, practically the entire literary
> output of the eighteenth century because of what he considered to be
> its outdated formalism, all subjects based on a mythology of
> redemption, all historical plays, and all prose dramas.

That's Henry-Louis de La Grange describing Hugo Wolf's search for a
source for his first opera.