A BOY WAS BORN, Britten's Opus 3, is a formidable achievement for a student of 19. Completed in 1933, it is based on texts ranging from fifteenth-century carols to Christina Rossetti's “In the Bleak Mid-winter,” and is cast in the form of a theme and six variations for unaccompanied men’s, women's and boys’ voices. Most choirs found it so difficult that in 1955 the composer felt obliged to revise it and add an optional organ part. He never wrote another piece as challenging for voices.

The work's premiere was given by the BBC's Wireless Chorus on 23 February 1934 in the concert hall of Broadcasting House. Peter Pears was among the tenors. Britten wanted his old mentor, Frank Bridge, to conduct, but the BBC preferred Leslie Woodgate, the Chorus's newly appointed director. The important part for boys’ voices was assigned to the choristers of a fashionable Mayfair church, St Mark’s, North Audley Street. At rehearsals, Britten found their singing “occasionally somewhat on the lumbering side; but I think I have put most of that right.” He judged the performance itself a success, but must have had lingering doubts about the St Mark's choristers, for when plans were being laid for the work's first public performance, to be conducted by Iris Lemare the following December at the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate, he approached Goodall and asked him if there was any chance of the St Alban's boys taking part.

Goodall agreed at once to the proposal. The composer, who was just 21, sat by the stove in the St Alban's schoolroom, while Goodall, twelve years his senior, hammered the notes into the heads of his six best choristers – the Mercury's small stage put a strict limit on the number of performers. “He was a very shy boy,” Goodall remembered. “He treated me with respect; but it should have been the other way round.” In fact they were both shy. They got on well – apart from anything else they shared a low opinion of the Royal College. Both suffered from inferiority complexes.