ABSTRACT
The idea of the ‘total work of art’ appealed to modernists of the early twentieth century as an opportunity to refresh aesthetic experience and overcome its compartmentalization by nineteenth-century institutions of culture. H. G. Wells hoped to realize a version of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which he called ‘spectacle-music-drama’, in the film Things to Come, directed, under his supervision, by William Cameron Menzies and produced by Alexander Korda. In the mid-1930s, Wells’s ideas were unfashionable. Popular film and literature were reasserting Victorian values in the face of the anti-Victorian reaction of the cultural elite in the immediate post-war years. The music for Things to Come is the only aspect of the final release that has met with general praise, and it has acquired an independent existence through performances and recordings of Bliss’s concert suite.
