"According to historical reports, Grainne (1530?-1603), also known as Grace O’Malley, an Irish pirate and Chieftain, visited the court of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) to free some of her kinsmen from Sir Richard Bingham, Elizabeth I’s governor in Ireland. While Queen Elizabeth was the official monarch of one of the growing European superpowers, and Grace O’Malley was an Irish Chieftain and pirate living as far outside the reach of English law as she could, the two women actually had a lot in common. Both women were around 60 years of age around the time of their meeting. Both had overcome fathers who did not think of them as proper heirs due to their gender; both had loved passionately and lost, and both ruled with a combination of savvy and courage that made them famous in their time.

For the short opera buffa The Two Graces, the meeting of Grace O’Malley and Elizabeth I is taken out of the court setting in which it historically occurred in 1593, and set in Elizabeth I’s boudoir, the night before the official visit is to take place. These two remarkable women, anomalies in their time, seemingly at opposite ends of the spectrum, come to see in each other something they have never before encountered over the course of their long and eventful lives: an equal."

- Alexis Diamond