Music: Haydn’s Voyage

The earth hung in a cobalt sky like a giant circus balloon. The landscape was dotted with papier-mache roses and lilies and peopled by curly-horned horses, characters in tasseled, clownlike costumes, and a peruked barrister in trailing robes. Thus the surface of the moon appeared to the space dreamers of Franz Joseph Haydn’s day, and last week the vision glowed warmly on the stage of The Hague’s Royal Theater as part of the Holland Festival. Occasion: the first complete performance since Haydn’s time of his opera The World of the Moon (its original third act was lost, was recovered by U.S. Musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon).

In last week’s performance, Moon proved to be a frolicsome work with a gaily rippling score, evocative of Haydn’s more celebrated The Seasons. If it was sometimes as thin as the moon’s atmosphere itself, it also offered several rollicking ensembles, a rousing love duet, and a bubbly beat, as if Papa Haydn had been determined to do a gavotte straight into the stratosphere.

The libretto, by Italy’s Carlo Goldoni, is a typical 18th century spoof of intriguing lovers and amateur scientists, involving a fat and foolish old father who will not let his two daughters marry suitors he disapproves of. When the old man peers through a telescope at the moon and thinks he spots a bevy of handsomely configured nymphs cavorting about in the near nude, one of his prospective sons-in-law feeds him a magic elixir that, he is told, will transport him to the wonderful moon world. Convinced, when he comes to, that he really is on the moon, he encounters various phony lunar marvels (including a tongue-twisting lunar language with phrases like “Luna lena lino lana lino lunala”). In the end, love conquers time and space, but what counts is expressed in one of the opera’s jubilant lines: “It’s a wonderful life on the moon.”

Last week’s audience applauded Haydn’s stargazing to the rafters, and the critics beamed. Nobody seemed to mind that Haydn’s outer space was shaped remarkably like an 18th century Viennese drawing room.