It was premiered on December 15, 2000, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris by soloists Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Willard White, the vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices (consisting of countertenors Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings, and Steven Rickards), the London Voices, La Maîtrise de Paris, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, with Kent Nagano conducting.

Also included are poems by Rosario Castellanos, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, Rubén Darío, librettist Peter Sellars, and Adams himself.

[2][5] A shortened version of the work, removing two of the three countertenors and the chorus as well as much of the orchestra, was suggested by soprano Julia Bullock in 2018 for a performance at The Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the title El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered.

[2][8] It received its collegiate premiere as a semi-staged oratorio on November 6, 2002, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, conducted by Carmen Helena Téllez, with student soloists Su-Hyoun Kim, Hannah Penn and Robert Samels, but also including the professional countertenors of the premiere, Dan Bubeck, Brian Cummings and Steve Rickards, members of Theater of Voices and alumni of the School.

[16] Susan McClary has identified how the work’s premodern elements further Peter Sellars’s key thematic concerns, demonstrating that such references have a function beyond chronological eclecticism.