Key figures: Joseph Haydn (composer), Carlo Goldoni (librettist), Prince Nikolaus Esterházy (patron), Count Anton Esterházy (groom, occasion for the premiere)
Summary
Joseph Haydn’s opera buffa Il mondo della luna (The World of the Moon) premiered on August 3, 1777, at the Eszterháza palace in Hungary, during the wedding celebrations of Count Anton Esterházy (son of Haydn’s patron, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy) and Countess Marie Josepha Erdődy. Haydn composed the work to a libretto by Carlo Goldoni originally written in 1750, which had previously been set to music by at least six other composers, most notably Baldassare Galuppi in Venice in 1750. The three-act comic opera—catalogued as Hob.XXVIII:7 in the Hoboken catalogue—stands as one of Haydn’s most ambitious operatic ventures and one of the richest examples of the dramma giocoso genre in the latter eighteenth century.
Haydn conducted the premiere himself from the keyboard. The work achieved immediate success, earning repeated performances throughout the 1777 Eszterháza season and full revivals in the summers of 1778 and 1779. After 1779 it was not staged again at Eszterháza, and the opera fell into obscurity for nearly two centuries—its parts scattered and incomplete—before being reconstructed and revived in the twentieth century.
Plot
The opera in three acts weaves a farcical astronomical deception around a marriage comedy:
- Act I: Ecclitico, a fraudulent astronomer, contrives to dupe the gullible merchant Buonafede. He allows Buonafede to peer through a telescope at a faked image of the moon, where beautiful women and handsome men live freely and pleasurably without work or guardians. Buonafede, captivated, agrees to pay handsomely to be transported there.
- Act II: Buonafede is drugged and carried to Ecclitico’s elaborately decorated garden, which the astronomer has dressed up as the “world of the moon.” Buonafede wakes to find himself surrounded by “lunar” inhabitants—actually Ecclitico’s friends and servants in costume. In this supposed paradise, Buonafede is persuaded to consent to marriages that he had previously forbidden: Ecclitico to his daughter Clarice, the knight Ernesto to his other daughter Flaminia, and his servant Cecco to the maidservant Lisetta.
- Act III: The deception is revealed, but Buonafede—chastened and somewhat amused—ratifies the three marriages rather than appear foolish, reconciling the comic ensemble.
The libretto’s satire operates on multiple levels: it mocks scientific charlatanism, patriarchal authority over daughters’ marriage choices, the credulity of the nouveaux riches, and the utopian fantasy of a better world elsewhere.
Goldoni’s Libretto and Its Predecessors
Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793), the celebrated Venetian playwright and librettist, wrote the original Il mondo della luna text in 1750 for the Venetian carnival season. Galuppi’s setting (Venice, 1750) was the first and most successful early version; other composers to set the libretto before Haydn included Vincenzo Ciampi (1754) and Florian Leopold Gassmann (1777, a setting roughly contemporary with Haydn’s). The libretto’s longevity across different compositional hands testifies to Goldoni’s genius for comic construction and his gift for writing texts that gave composers room for musical characterization.
Goldoni’s text belongs to a long tradition of “moon voyage” satire reaching from Lucian of Samosata’s Vera Historia (2nd century CE) through Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’autre monde (published 1657) and culminating in later works such as Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865). The 1777 premiere at Eszterháza coincided with renewed scientific interest in selenography (mapping and describing the moon), giving Goldoni’s satire an additional topical dimension.
Musical Character and Orchestration
Haydn’s score is notable for several musical features:
- Key scheme: The opera makes extensive use of E-flat major—the “lunar” key in Haydn’s symbolic language—throughout the work, particularly in Act II’s garden scenes. E-flat’s three flats and its association with ceremonial wind writing (horns, clarinets) lent it an ethereal, elevated character appropriate to the moon conceit.
- The overture: A three-movement sinfonia in fast-slow-fast form. The final movement is in 3/8 time with a driving energy characteristic of Haydn’s symphony finales of the same period (the Symphony No. 63 “La Roxelane” dates from roughly the same years).
- Ensemble writing: Haydn exploits the comic ensemble—the sextet of principal characters—in extended finale sequences at the close of each act. The Act II finale is particularly remarkable for its sustained dramatic tension as the deception begins to unravel.
- Aria variety: The score encompasses a wide emotional range, from the pseudo-scientific patter of Ecclitico’s Act I arias to the lyrical tenderness of Clarice’s love music and the buffo exaggeration of Buonafede’s comic numbers.
The Eszterháza court orchestra, which Haydn had been developing since his appointment in 1761, numbered approximately twenty-five players at this period—smaller than the celebrated Mannheim ensemble that Mozart encountered in the same year, but a highly accomplished ensemble Haydn knew intimately.
Court Patronage and the Esterházy Household
The premiere context illustrates the mechanics of aristocratic musical patronage at their most elaborate. Prince Nikolaus Esterházy (1714–1790)—known as “Nikolaus the Magnificent”—had invested enormous sums in the Eszterháza palace, built on the shores of the Neusiedler Lake in Hungary from the 1760s onward. By 1777 the palace complex included a 400-seat opera house (inaugurated 1768), a marionette theater (inaugurated 1773), and extensive formal gardens capable of staging outdoor spectacles.
For the wedding of his son Anton, Nikolaus mounted an entire season of celebrations including operas, marionette plays, fireworks, and dances. Haydn, as Esterházy Kapellmeister since 1766, was responsible for all musical entertainment—composing, conducting, directing rehearsals, and managing the court musicians. The commission for Il mondo della luna was part of this institutional obligation. Despite the scale and sophistication of this court operation, one contemporary observer—almost certainly a visitor unimpressed by operatic comedy—dismissed the work as “une farce pour la populace et pour les enfants” (“a farce for common people and children”), reflecting the ambivalent status of opera buffa in aristocratic circles that still privileged opera seria.
Rediscovery and Modern Revival
After 1779, Il mondo della luna essentially disappeared. The parts were scattered across various libraries, and no complete score survived in a single location. The opera attracted scholarly attention in the mid-twentieth century as part of the broader Haydn renaissance. The musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon (1926–2009), one of the century’s foremost Haydn scholars, played a central role in reconstructing the score from surviving sources.
The first modern revival took place at the Holland Festival in 1959 (conducted by Antal Doráti, who also led the definitive Haydn complete symphonies recording). The 1959 revival demonstrated that the opera could succeed with twentieth-century audiences and inaugurated a series of professional stagings that have continued to the present. A notable 1984 production at the Glyndebourne Festival (conducted by Simon Rattle) brought the work to wider international attention.
Significance
Il mondo della luna exemplifies Haydn’s prolific and sophisticated engagement with opera, a genre in which he produced over twenty works during his Esterházy years (c. 1761–1790)—a body of work that remained undervalued relative to his symphonies and string quartets until modern scholarship and revival efforts restored it to prominence. The opera illustrates the pivotal role of court patronage in the eighteenth century: a work of genuine artistic ambition could premiere not in a commercial theater for a paying public but in a private palace for an aristocratic household, limiting its immediate circulation but not its intrinsic quality.
Goldoni’s enduring libretto, reset seven or more times between 1750 and 1777, reflects the period’s fascination with the moon as both a site of philosophical fantasy and a subject of natural philosophy. The moon voyages of Enlightenment fiction (Goldoni, Voltaire, later Cyrano) offered authors a means to satirize earthly society through the device of a better world elsewhere—a tradition that runs from Lucian to H. G. Wells. Haydn’s setting, by adding sophisticated musical characterization to Goldoni’s comic structure, raises the work above mere entertainment to the level of genuine dramma giocoso (“jocular drama”)—the genre designation Mozart would later adopt for Don Giovanni (1787) and Così fan tutte (1790).