On the thirty-first of May 1778, a young German arrived in Stockholm aboard a post coach after a long and perhaps arduous journey from the south. A former student of jurisprudence at Gottingen University, Joseph Martin Kraus, was already an experienced composer of music, a published author of both poetry and a play (not to mention a somewhat sharp critique of German opera of the period that was in press even as he traveled northwards), and an aspirant for a position at the court of Gustav III as part of the innovative musical establishment there.