Heggie set the "powerful credo" of Emily Dickinson's "I shall not live in vain" especially for the soprano who performs it on his album, Renée Fleming, after hearing her sing in a rehearsal of Rusalka at the San Francisco Opera.

She wrote the texts for the cycle, commissioned Heggie to write its music and premiered it with Martin Katz on 20 September 1997 in the Zellerbach Auditorium of the University of California at Berkeley.

The fourth relates how von Stade had to be rescued by a fireman after climbing onto her roof as a child, and how history repeated itself when Lisa made the same mistake as her mother.

Both the words and the music were written for the singer who performs them on the album, Nicolle Foland, who premiered the work with Donald Runnicles on 27 April 1997 at the Old First Church, San Francisco.

[2] Before the Storm is a cycle of four songs written at the request of the artists who perform the third of them on the album, the late Zheng Cao, to whom the work is dedicated, and Emil Miland, two more colleagues of Heggie's at the SFO.

[2] The second of the album's Emily Dickinson settings, "If you were coming in the Fall" (a winner in G. Schirmer's 1995 competition for new American art songs), is sung by Kristin Clayton, another SFO resident artist.

[2] Songs to the Moon was commissioned by the consortium Music Accord for von Stade, who premiered it with Martin Katz on 20 August 1998 at the Ravinia Festival, Illinois.

[3] Drawing on whimsical fantasies by Vachel Lindsay, the cycle sets "short fairy stories in which a personal and often very humorous view of the moon" is offered by a series of characters in turn.

[6] It was also noted in Ken Wlaschin's Encyclopedia of American Opera[7] and Judith E. Carman, William K. Gaeddert and Rita M. Resch's Art Song in the United States, 1759-1999.