The last decade of the nineteenth and the early years of the new century had been full of incidents, challenges, and changes for Chadwick. Among the wishes he noted for the twentieth century at the beginning of 1901 was not only a “great composer born on American soil,” but also the burning desire for a “symphony orchestra of Americans with a born American conductor.” He himself had achieved what he had wished for when he decided to become a composer: he had become a symphony composer. That he started exploring new musical fields after the success of the third symphony helps explain why he felt drawn to bigger vocal and also stage-affiliated genres no earlier than around 1900. Although he had always been fond of opera and other genres of the musical stage, Chadwick's ambitions in this field up until then were never as clearly pronounced as for the symphonic domain. However, with the challenges the restructuring of the conservatory implied, especially with the ambition of the implementation of an opera school, Chadwick approached the structures and dynamics of the operatic world in a way which for him, as a composer in a local surrounding without much love for the theater, must have been a new experience.

Yet Boston's difficult history with opera confronted composers with many obstacles. In 1904, Louis C. Elson remarked in his History of American Music: “in the domain of opera America has as yet done but little … Opera has been an exotic save in two cities, New York and New Orleans, the former having been the musical center of the country in operatic matters from the very beginning. Boston … is provincial in the matter of grand opera.” Indeed, Boston's audiences were quite resistant to opera. For a long while musical life in Boston was influenced by its Puritan history. How strong the resistance against the stage had been particularly in New England, is documented by the “Act preventing Stage-Plays and other Theatrical Entertainments,” which had been passed by the Massachusetts legislature in 1750; it prohibited any theatrical performance. In 1778, a Resolution of the Continental Congress had banned all activities that might have disturbed the revolutionary spirit, and had thus suspended the development of theatrical life in general until after the revolution.