Utopian Hymn: An Enigma Resolved
Left to right: Robert Morley, Wendy Hiller, author George Bernard Shaw, Shaw's secretary Blanche Patch, film producer and director Gabriel Pascal
Concerning the ‘Utopian Hymn’, a 78 rpm playback recording made by Denham Film Studios, discussed in my talk given at The English Music Festival, Dorchester-on-Thames, 26 May 2014:
This short choral work was in fact penned by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) for the 1941 British film
Major Barbara and may be heard on the soundtrack, approximately ten minutes before the end of the film, during a brief scene showing Shaw’s vision of a socialist post-war Utopian world. The film is a reworking of Shaw’s 1905 stage play of the same name made by the Hungarian director/producer Gabriel Pascal (1894-1954).
Shaw’s verses for his Utopian Hymn were originally written to fit a quartet with chorus
Preghiera (“Dal tuo stellato soglio”) from the last act of Rossini’s opera
Moses in Egypt. According to the film script published by Penguin Books in 1945, Shaw envisioned a scene in Undershaft’s Utopian world in which an announcer proclaims “To make [the opera] live again we have interpreted the Red Sea as a symbol of the Socialist revolution on which our most glorious hopes and our deadliest fears are fixed ... The words alone are brought up to date.”
In the extant film print, however, there is no
Moses in Egypt performance, no singers accompanied by the hundred strong Wagnerian orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini, as Shaw wished for. Instead, Gabriel Pascal shows a grand square of churches and temples in a panoramic view, underscored by Sir William Walton’s resetting of the hymn. The words sung in the background by a boys’ choir are indistinguishable.
Utopian Hymn survives among Shaw’s personal collection of musical scores at Shaw’s Corner, Ayot St. Lawrence near Welwyn in Hertfordshire, an Edwardian villa where Shaw lived when at the height of his fame. His original idea for the vocal score is also preserved and will be found in Shaw’s papers in The British Library (sample score sheet appended).
To set the record straight, Utopian Hymn has nothing to do with Bliss’s
Things to Come.
N. William Snedden - July 2022
