Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden met while working for the General Post Office Film Unit in 1935, and collaborated on film and radio broadcasts, songs, and dramatic works until the early 1940s. Britten contributed incidental music to many plays produced for The Group Theatre, including Auden and Isherwood's The Ascent of F6, and he later set lyrics from The Dog Beneath the Skin. The duo wrote a set of cabaret songs influenced by popular musical idioms for Hedli Anderson, and Britten's song cycle On this Island, op. 11 (1938), takes its texts from Look, Stranger!.

Some of the Britten's overtly leftist political music was written in coordination with Auden. Our Hunting Fathers, op. 8 (1936), is Britten's first cycle for voice and orchestra; Auden's prologue and epilogue, and the texts he selected, are both a commentary on fox-hunting and on political developments on the European continent. Ballad of Heroes, op. 14 (1939), is an orchestral cantata commemorating British members of the International Brigade.

The operetta Paul Bunyan, op. 17 (1941), Britten's first full-length musical theatre work, was written and produced while he and Auden were living in Brooklyn Heights, NY. It was poorly received by critics and withdrawn. In the mid-1970s, Britten revised the piece, removing two of the songs and writing some new music.

Britten's last major setting of an Auden work, Hymn to St. Cecilia, op. 27, was composed in 1942.