Our Hunting Fathers

Our Hunting Fathers, Op. 8, is an orchestral song-cycle by Benjamin Britten, first performed in 1936. Its text, assembled and partly written by W. H. Auden, with a pacifist slant, puzzled audiences at the premiere, and the work has never achieved the popularity of the composer's later orchestral song-cycles, Les Illuminations, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and the Nocturne.

In the mid-1930s Britten was employed by the GPO Film Unit, composing music for documentary films. Also working for the unit was the poet and critic W. H. Auden, with whom Britten collaborated on the films Coal Face (1935) and Night Mail (1936). Auden was something of a mentor to the young Britten, encouraging him to widen his aesthetic, intellectual and political horizons.

Britten received a commission to compose a work involving orchestra for the 1936 Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Music Festival. Auden assembled the text for an orchestral song cycle, writing some of it and adapting other sections from existing poems. The work, described as a "symphonic cycle for high voice and orchestra", was composed between May and July 1936 and titled Our Hunting Fathers.

On 19 September 1936, less than a week before the premiere, Britten rehearsed the work with the soprano Sophie Wyss and the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the loft at Covent Garden. Britten afterwards described the rehearsal as "the most catastrophic evening of my life" which left him "feeling pretty suicidal". According to Sophie Wyss, the "members of the orchestra were not used to that kind of music and played about disgracefully. When the reference to rats came in the score they ran around pretending they were chasing rats on the floor!"Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was present, reproved the orchestra, with the result, Wyss recalls, that the players "pulled themselves together" in time for the next rehearsal held in Norwich on 21 September.

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