On the inception and composition of the work, Rouse wrote in the score program notes:
In the days when I would have still contemplated composing an opera, my preferred source was Edgar Allan Poe's 'Masque of the Red Death.' A marvelous story full of both symbolism and terror, it is only five pages long and would thus require 'padding' instead of the usual brutal cutting of the story. I had contemplated some sort of melding of the Poe story with Leonid Andreyev's symbolist play 'The Black Maskers.' However, I shall not be composing an opera, and so I decided to redirect my ideas into what might be considered an overture to an unwritten opera.[1]
Reviewing the world premiere, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim of The New York Times praised Prospero's Rooms, saying, "In Mr. Rouse’s atmospheric work, the story is told with dreamlike speed — 10 minutes from the cadaverous contrabassoon line that opens over quiet string rumblings to the final terrifying crash. Poe’s ball takes place in a sequence of monochrome rooms and the music had a strong sense of motion and spaces being entered and left behind, as well as colors that sometimes seemed eerily disembodied from the instruments that produced them."[5] George Hall of The Guardian called the work "unmemorable," but nevertheless complimented it as "a lively, if frenetic, piece of orchestral writing."[6]
