Although there seems to have been a craze for opera composition in Australia in the late nineteenth century, with more than thirty composed between 1880 and 1900, in the following decades only a few composers attempted it, and mainly those associated with conservatoriums. PGH was in fact one of a select few Australian-born composers who completed an opera between 1900 and 1939.

Among the earliest twentieth-century opera composers in Australia were several English-born men and women: G.W.L. Marshall-Hall and Florence Ewart in Melbourne and W. Arundell Orchard, later director of the Sydney Conservatorium, in Sydney. Ewart, although originally a prodigy on the violin, studied composition with Respighi in the 1920s and subsequently composed The Courtship of Miles Standish in 1931 and Nala’s Wedding in 1933. Fritz Hart, the most prolific composer of operas in the country, director of the Melba Conservatorium and PGH’s composition teacher, was also born in England. Possibly at work on Isolt of the White Hands while Glanville-Hicks was studying with him, he left Melbourne for Hawaii soon after, having added fourteen operas to the list of all those composed in Australia. Below is Christian Waller’s poster for the production of Hart’s romantic comedy Pierrette (1913) in Melbourne in 1931, which involved Glanville-Hicks and her fellow students at the Melba Conservatorium.