Thornton Wilder in 1954 after the two had met while working at the MacDowell Colony. They considered several scenarios before deciding to base the opera on Wilder's existing stage play about the Greek figure Alcestis. Composed while Talma was in residence at the American Academy in Rome and at the MacDowell Colony, The Alcestiad was completed in 1958. Although several American opera houses, including the Lyric Opera in Chicago, the Met, and the San Francisco Opera, expressed interest in the work, all of them deemed it too difficult for American performers and audiences. Wilder had previously enjoyed considerable success in Germany, and Die Alkestiade was premiered by the Oper Frankfurt in 1962. It was the first time full-scale opera by an American woman was performed at a major European theatre. However, perhaps due to the enormous resources the work requires, and despite the fact that it was critically and publicly well-received, it remains relatively unknown. Nonetheless, The Alcestiad secured Talma a place in the ranks of ground-breaking American and female composers; in 1963 she was the first female composer to win the Harriet Cohen International Music Award; and in 1974 was the first woman elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Talma's extensive body of works include vocal and choral pieces and works for solo piano, chamber ensembles, and orchestra, as well as a chamber opera, and settings of texts by Auden, Browning, Dickinson, Donne, Hopkins, Keats, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Stevens, Wyatt, and others. Talma dedicated several works to John F. Kennedy after his assassination, including Dialogues for piano and orchestra (1964) and A Time to Remember (1967), an oratorio that sets Kennedy's own words. The Tolling Bell, Talma's setting of texts by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne for baritone and orchestra, was completed in 1969 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music. Talma wrote her own libretto for her 1976 chamber opera, Have You Heard? Do You Know?, a work about the Cold War and the desire for utopias; and continued to compose prolifically into her eighties. She died in Saratoga Springs, New York while working on an elegiac piece, The Lengthening Shadows, while in residence at the Yaddo colony. A full-length study of Talma's music by musicologist Kendra Preston Leonard, Louise Talma: A Life in Composition, was published in 2014. List of works Opera The Alcestiad, to a libretto by Thornton Wilder, premiered by the