The recitatives and chorus parts were written by John Knowles Paine, and James Russell Lowell translated the libretto into English.
[1] Child was a Harvard English professor and opera lover, and the text was originally inspired by an incident which occurred to a colleague of his.
[1] The opera begins with a chorus sung to the tune of "La dolce aurora" from Rossini's Mosè in Egitto.
[2] It was first performed in a benefit concert for the Sanitary Commission, an organization that treated ill and wounded soldiers of the Union army.
The primary sources for the reconstruction of Il pesceballo are the published libretto by Child, and the recitatives and chorus parts penned by Paine, which were discovered by Mary Ellen Brown.