Benjamin Britten composed Our Hunting Fathers, Op. 8, between May and July 1936, on a commission from the Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Music Festival. The text, describing a "symphonic cycle for high voice and orchestra," was assembled by the poet W. H. Auden, who wrote the Prologue and Epilogue himself and drew the three central poems, Rats Away!, Messalina, and Dance of Death, from earlier anonymous and Renaissance sources. Britten conducted the premiere on 25 September 1936 at St Andrew's Hall in Norwich, with soprano Sophie Wyss, the singer he had written the piece for, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Written when Britten was only twenty-two, the work was later described by the composer himself as his true opus one, marking the point at which his musical language and ambition matured decisively.

Scored for solo high voice and a large, colorful orchestra, the cycle uses its unusual, biting text, ostensibly about the relationship between humans and animals in the hunt, to explore darker undercurrents of violence and cruelty, giving the vocal writing an unusually wide expressive and dramatic range. Britten's orchestration is vivid and inventive throughout, matching Auden's sharp, unsettling imagery with equally sharp instrumental color, from the manic energy of Rats Away! to the somber closing funeral march. Though it puzzled its first audience and has never achieved the popularity of Britten's later orchestral song cycles, Our Hunting Fathers is now recognized by scholars and performers as a work of striking originality and ambition, and this score and set of parts offers an outstanding opportunity to bring a genuinely powerful and historically important early Britten masterpiece to the concert stage.