of inventing a distinctive national identity. One goal of the Fennomans was to develop vernacular opera, which they believed to be symbolic of nationhood; to do so, they would need a permanent company with an opera house and a Finnish-language repertoire at its disposal. Swedish-speaking Helsinki already had a permanent theatre company housed at the Swedish Theatre, and thanks to Fredrik Pacius, two notable, Swedish-language operas: King Charles's Hunt (, 1852) and The Princess of Cyprus (, 1860). Success was hard-won: in 1872, the Fennoman Kaarlo Bergbom founded the Finnish Theatre Company, and a year later it named its singing branch the Finnish Opera Company. This was a small group that, without an opera house as residence, toured the country performing the foreign repertoire translated into Finnish. However, the Fennomans still remained without an opera written to a Finnish libretto, and in 1879 the Finnish Opera Company folded due to financial difficulties. Acting as a catalyst, in 1891 the Finnish Literature Society organized a competition that provided domestic composers with the following brief: submit before the end of 1896 a Finnish-language opera about Finland's history or mythology; the winning composer and librettist receive 2000 and 400 markka, respectively. Sibelius had seemed an obvious candidate to inaugurate a new vernacular era, as he had become a favorite of the Fennomans with his Finnish-language masterpiece Kullervo, a setting of The Kalevala for soloists, male choir, and orchestra. The competition was the impulse for The Building of the Boat, the 1893–1894 project in which Sibelius had aspired to write a mythological, Finnish-language on the subject of Väinämöinen. But Sibelius abandoned this opera due to self-doubt and artistic evolution. In the end, the Society received no submissions, and when Sibelius finally emerged with his first opera, it was 1896's The Maiden in the Tower to a Swedish libretto. In its reviews, the Finnish-language press asked for Sibelius's next opera to be in the vernacular. Scholars have offered several explanations for the seeming conundrum that is 's Swedish-language libretto. First, Hertzberg's selection as librettist probably guaranteed a story in Swedish; he was known not only for his Swedish-language historical novels and translations of Finnish folklore (including The Kalevala and excerpts from The Kanteletar), but also for his longtime association with the Swedish-language press. Second, Sibelius also was more comfortable with Swedish, his mother tongue. For example, while composing Kullervo in 1891, his letters to his