After the success of The Turn of the Screw (1954), almost 15 years passed before its librettist, Myfanwy Piper, again actively collaborated with Britten. Despite this lengthy gap in time, she never doubted that such an opportunity would arise, for Britten had indicated that he wanted to repeat their endeavour. He turned to her in 1967, when the BBC commissioned an opera specifically for television and which was sold in advance to twelve other international companies for simultaneous transmission. With this opportunity to reach a very wide audience, he needed a story that would be, in his own words, ‘both personal and powerful’ and which would suit the medium of television. He had been impressed by Henry James's Owen Wingrave when he first read it in 1954. There is in the Red House at Aldeburgh a complete set of James, but in addition Britten acquired volume 9 of Leon Edel's collected edition of Henry James, published 1962, and this appears to have been his working copy for Owen Wingrave. It is widely recognized that the tale became the vehicle through which he voiced his deeply held commitment to pacifism and his hatred of war, beliefs exacerbated at this time by the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the continuation of the Vietnam War. The story also offers a challenge to the conventions and traditions of militarism, especially those rooted in dynasties.

Britten first mentioned Owen Wingrave to his librettist on a visit to Fawley Bottom, the Pipers’ home in Buckinghamshire. Piper not only recollected that he had spoken of it before, while writing his War Requiem (1961–2), but she also immediately understood its significance for him, for she had read all James's stories. Asked if she would do the libretto, her response was straightforward: ‘I said yes. And that was it.’

Behind Owen Wingrave lies the complicated history of Britten's uneasy relationship with television. It is sufficient here to mention that in 1952, having reluctantly sanctioned the American NBC Opera Company's televised version of Billy Budd (1950–1), which reduced the four-act three-hour opera to a 90-minute production, Britten thought it ‘badly and desperately cut’, and was left profoundly suspicious of the medium.