The text of Father William is a poem which Alice recites to the pretentious caterpillar in Lewis Carroll's famous children's novel, Alice in Wonderland. It is a comic poem about a young boy who asks his father why he has such eccentric habits (such as standing on his head, or balancing an eel on his nose), until the father tires of the incessant questions and throws his son out the door.

Although this composition is only 10 minutes in duration, it can be considered the only operetta Morawetz ever wrote. When once asked why he does not write a full length opera, Morawetz' response was "why should I work on a composition for two or three years only to hear it performed once". His reasoning was that operas require such enormous budgets (an orchestra, singers, costumes, and a full production crew) that he would be lucky to have many repeated performances of his work. To invest so much time in creating an opera did not seem "cost-effective". In the January 1978 issue of Fugue, Morawetz says:

If I lived in Germany, where there are over sixty opera stages, I would have written an opera long ago, but here there is only one resident company: the Canadian Opera Company.

I'm not conceited enough to think that I can do better than many of the composers whose works have yet to be performed by the Canadian Opera, people like Janácek, Walton, and Benjamin Britten.

Nonetheless, he was obviously intrigued by this format. He first composed Father William as a recital piece for solo baritone and piano. He then revised the work so that it became a conversation between the boy (soprano) and his father (baritone). In 1981, Morawetz was finally lured by the possibility that the University of Toronto Opera School would present the work as a fully staged "mini-opera". To this end, he considerably lengthened the composition by adding many stage directions, and supplementary music to accompany the action on the stage. Regrettably Morawetz' fear was realized when this version was never programmed by the Opera School, and to this day, the 1981 staged version has not been presented to audiences.