Aethon enters the palace disguised as a beggar and, following goddess Athena's instructions, eventually manages to exterminate the suitors and marry Nausicaa.

The opera was composed from 1958 to 1960 for the Athens Festival, at which it was premiered on 1961, with soprano Teresa Stratas embodying the title role at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus.

[5] During this time, Glanville-Hicks asked for the aid of her friend, librettist Alastair Reid[6] and then moved to the island of Mallorca, where Graves had settled a decade before, in 1946.

[8] As she put it, Greek traditional music "has the old sound", with "the rhythm built within the melody";[1] during a previous stage of her career, the composer had attempted to create music by constructing the melody over the rhythm but, in her own words, such a feat required "a lot of percussion instruments", whose percussionists were sparse, making all the related projects "very expensive" and causing many objections.

[1] Furthermore, she researched the archives of the Academy of Athens looking for useful ideas and then incorporated musical elements from the traditions of Epirus, the Peloponnese, Crete and the Dodecanese in her composition.

For the choruses, she composed music echoing the Greek traditional songs, which appealed to the much more massive Greek-speaking audience of the opera's first presentation.

[14] In a contemporary review published in Time, Nausicaa's music is defined as "bony and strong, like the Greek landscape" and the fact that the composer willingly chose to use an orchestra of just 60 instruments for the play is also noted.

In the same review, the opera's vocal parts are characterised as "highly declamatory", while the "use of the metric cadence of Greek folk song" is described as a means of intensifying their dramatic effect.

[16] Glanville-Hicks herself undertook to tackle the various problems of organising the opera's premiere, including picking the soloists and advertising the event.

[14] Eventually, the composer picked four upcoming soloists for the leading roles, all of whom had Greek origin, so that they could deal with the opera's linguistic duality.

[22] Variety reported that a "ten minute ovation" greeted the cast, winning "eight curtain calls from the capacity crowd", and that Butler's staging was "top drawer".

[23] Following its premiere, the work came to be considered as Glanville-Hicks' great success —paralleled only to her opera The Transposed Heads[24]— and it brought her wide acclaim for the rest of her career.

[α][8] (19 August 1961, Odeon of Herodes Atticus) The libretto is an adaptation of the myth of Nausicaa and Odysseus, based on Robert Graves' novel Homer's Daughter, set in the Palace of Drepanum, a Greek city-state in Western Sicily, during the 7th century BCE by approximation.

In accordance with the work of Robert Graves, a secondary theme of the libretto is the depiction of Nausicaa as the author of an altered version of The Odyssey.

Nausicaa announces that any suitor who succeeds in arching the Great Bow of Hercules located in the palace will be able to claim her in marriage.