In the middle of Jack Beeson, Kenward Elmslie, and Richard Plant's 1965 opera Lizzie Borden, a woman sits at a harmonium, accompanying herself as she performs what sounds like a nineteenth-century parlor song. The woman’s name is Abbie, and she is Lizzie Borden's ill-fated stepmother. The song she sings, which Beeson referred to as the “Bird Song,” recalls the “Willow Song” that Douglas Moore included in The Ballad of Baby Doe. Indeed, both songs sound back to nineteenth-century ideas about gender and domesticity—and the operas to which both songs belong suggest that such ideas are under attack.

In 1954, the very same year in which Douglas Moore and John Latouche began working on The Ballad of Baby Doe, Jack Beeson and Richard Plant began writing an opera about Lizzie Borden, the alleged axe-murderess from Fall River, Massachusetts. In contrast to Elizabeth “Baby Doe” Tabor (1854–1935), Lizzie Andrew Borden (1860–1927) appeared not merely to threaten the American family but to violently obliterate it. On August 11, 1892, seven days after her father and stepmother were found hacked to death in their home, the thirty-two-year-old Lizzie was arrested. She was tried and eventually acquitted, yet in the court of public opinion, she remained guilty. Since 1892, Lizzie the hatchet-swinging murderess has loomed large in New England lore—in newspaper stories and exposés, books, plays, a ballet, a children's rhyme, a television miniseries, and numerous movies.

Lizzie Borden has almost always prompted the same question: why? Why would a “lady” pick up a hatchet and wield it, first against her stepmother, and then against her father, striking each one not just once but over and over again? Beeson and Plant were particularly drawn to the idea of writing an opera that would answer this question, and in its final form, Lizzie Borden suggested that the title heroine was a repressed spinster, driven to commit murder because of a psychosexual complex and an impossible domestic situation. Beeson, Plant, and Kenward Elmslie (who took over as librettist in 1961) turned Lizzie's stepmother into a cruel and conniving woman, and they turned her father into a physically abusive miser.