Benjamin Britten composed Missa Brevis in D in 1959 for a commission granted to honor the occasion of George Malcolm retiring as organist and choirmaster of Westminster Cathedral, a dual responsibility that he fulfilled for 12 years. This brief setting of the liturgical Mass Ordinary, excluding the Credo, was written for boys' voices and organ. On July 22, 1959, the Missa Brevis in D (1959) was first performed at the Westminster Cathedral.

After composing two pieces in 1958 featuring the tenor, Peter Pears, whose name is synonymous with most of Britten's vocal music, the composer decided, in 1959, to accept two commissions. The first of these obligations was a piece, titled Cantata Academica, for the 500th anniversary of a university. Missa Brevis in D was the second commission. After successful performances of both, Britten turned his attention to composing his opera based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Amazingly, the composer finished all of the work for this grand opera in only seven months. Britten, like Mozart, often thought about future compositions well previous to the time that the first note was written. "The Missa Brevis in D was written in only a few days, but he had been thinking about it for more than six months," Imogen Holst commented about Britten's compositional process.

George Malcolm, as choirmaster of the Westminster Boys' Choir, was known for teaching his singers to produce a tone like that of a wind instrument, with less overtones than normal vocal sound. Britten took advantage of this feature of the performing force by creating a more dissonant work. The choir's performance of the piece presented the dissonances in their most natural form, and were thus, lucid and less striking to the ear.

The Missa Brevis in D, along with Cantata Academica (1959), were Britten's first published works with a Latin text. Latin is considered to be a "dead" language, meaning that no culture in the world learns it as their mother tongue. Thus, the speech patterns and rhythm of the language are not known. Britten, always ready for a compositional challenge, decided to use the words only as phonetic syllables and allowed melody to dictate the rhythms and phrase contour of the music.

The Kyrie is the opening movement of the Mass Ordinary. Britten's setting of this movement is extremely slow-moving, lyrical and connected. The Gloria is much more complex, presented in the mixed meter of 7/8. An ostinato eighth-note pattern is featured in the organ part. This movement is spirited, with multiple imitation patterns heard throughout. The Sanctus returns to a regular meter and is set in a stately manner. This movement's second half consists of the Benedictus, which is slower, gentler, and more melodic than the movement's first half. The final movement is the Agnus Dei, which is the most dissonant section of the Missa Brevis in D. A half-step dissonance startles the listener in the opening measure of the organ part.

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