Norman O'Neill

[5] O'Neill began to have some success with concert music, including a 1901 performance of his overture In Autumn given at the Henry Wood Proms.

[6] In 1904 he composed the incidental music to John Martin-Harvey’s production of Hamlet at the Lyric Theatre, London.

He and Adine frequently hosted fellow composers and musicians at their house, 4 Pembroke Villas in Kensington, including Frederick Delius, Theodore Holland, Gustav Holst, Ernest Irving, Percy Grainger and Cyril Scott.

O'Neill's works for the stage include over fifty sets of incidental music for plays, including many by Shakespeare (Hamlet, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V and Measure for Measure), J. M. Barrie (A Kiss for Cinderella and Mary Rose), and Maurice Maeterlinck (The Blue Bird).

[9] Ernest Irving, who deputised as conductor for O'Neill on many occasions, compared a performance of Mary Rose without his music to "a dance by a fairy with a wooden leg.

[12] He received personal congratulations from Sir Edward Elgar[13] on his music for the innovative central ballet sequence of the 1924 revue The Punch Bowl, which ran for over a year with O'Neill's contribution being widely singled out for praise in press coverage.

[16] Solo piano works such as the Four Songs without Words[18] and the four-movement suite In the Branches[19] are still occasionally heard.