Britten once called this piece his "real Opus One." It picks up a thread of his school-boy days: He wrote a graduation thesis which was assigned on the subject of "Animals." His thesis was so radically "shocking" that he was expelled from school: Not only did he oppose the practice of blood sports, but he suggested, in effect, that the brutalizing effect of them was a cause of war. Pacifism was for Britten a life-long cause. Our Hunting Fathers returns to the subject of the ill-fated school essay in depicting animals' interactions with humans as pests, pets, accomplices, and prey: An anonymous ancient exorcism against rats, a mocking lament for a rich spoiled woman crying over her sick monkey, and a "Dance of Death" wherein a huntsman calls to his pack of dogs and falcons to urge them to capture their prey. The selection of poems was at the suggestion of his friend and would-be mentor, W.H. Auden, who also contributed some rather preachy opening and closing lines for the song cycle.

The importance of this work, aside from its relevance to Britten's life-long beliefs, lies in its astonishing mastery of orchestration for full orchestra. Britten displays his penchant for the use of high, almost glaring, woodwind sonorities. He shows remarkable ability to set the voice against the orchestra so as to insure projection of the text. The song "Rats Away, " in particular, uses a radical orchestral technique: Chords leap from one small group of instruments to another while a skirling, slithering figuration does likewise in clear depicting of the darting, leaping motion of the rats. Then there is the "Dance of Death, " where the orchestra erupts into a raging march, a highly bitter military parody. Amazingly, Britten had not yet heard a note of any orchestration of his for full orchestra when he wrote this piece.

The work is billed as being for "high voice" and orchestra. Britten had a woman's voice in mind when he wrote it, but it has proven well suited to tenor voices as well, especially that of his later companion Peter Pears, whose voice was so simulator to the woodwind colorations Britten favored.

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