Space Oddities
How Joseph Haydn beat Katy Perry into space
Ground control
Joseph Haydn’s Il mondo della Luna premiered in August, 1777, written for the wedding celebration of Count Nikolaus Esterházy (the son of Haydn’s patron). Being that it was written for a wedding, the plot carries all of the nutritional value of cotton candy: Two sisters are dying to get away from under their fathers’ thumb and marry the men they love, rather than make the dynastic marriages he’s banking on.
One of their boyfriends, a fake astronomer whose name is etymologically linked to the word “eclipse,” concocts a plan: He will, with the aid of a sedative, convince the girls’ father that he has traveled to the world of the moon. While there, a stranger in a strange land, he can easily be manipulated into consenting to his daughters marrying the men of their choice (as well as a third marriage between their maid and manservant).
The plan, though implausible, works. “Buonafede, looking through a phony telescope which is manipulated by Ecclitico’s students, observes phony moon scenes, including one in which a beautiful young ingénue tries to ensnare an old man in love’s toils,” Michael Brago writes in a 1984 synopsis of the work. When Buonafede (whose own name translates to “good faith”) arrives, he soon backs himself into betrothing his daughters to their beloveds, “partly because he is intimidated by the foreign ruler, but also because he is genuinely convinced that lunatics are motivated by altruism,” Brago adds, noting that Buonafede is soon disabused of this notion as well when the lunatics demand the key to his treasury.
Back on earth, the ruse dropped, the lovers lock Buonafede in his house until he consents to his agreements made in space. As above, so below.
Commencing countdown
Il mondo della Luna didn’t have a long life after its premiere in the Esterházy palace, at least not until the score was unearthed in 1932 in time for Haydn’s bicentennial. However, its source material, a commedia dell’arte libretto by Carlo Goldoni, had been previously set by six other composers before Papa Haydn came around to it. Goldoni originally wrote it for Baldassare Galuppi, whose 1750 setting premiered in Venice. Giovanni Paisiello ultimately set the libretto four different times.
The stars look very different
“Oh, what a great fine trade that is imposture!” Ecclitico sings at the beginning of Il mondo della Luna. “Some pretend to know alchemy, some unearth ‘treasure,’ some dispense secrets, some talk about the planets… I do my part with fake astronomy.”
The charlatan archetype has several incarnations in opera. There’s the snake-oil salesman Dulcamara in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, the great manipulator Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte. Even Figaro, particularly in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, isn’t entirely on the up and up, though he uses his powers for good, helping the young lovers to unite despite the scheming of Doctor Bartolo and Don Basilio.
Ecclitico is the most brazen of hoodwinkers, bragging that he’s “doing his part” as a bogus astronomer. But, like Figaro, we only see him use his powers to dupe a member of the nobility and in the service of un-moneyed love. He’s probably an exhausting person to be married to, but on the scam spectrum, ultimately harmless.
The success of this particular swindle also lies less in Ecclitico’s aptitude for manipulation and more in what Buonafede wants to believe: that, on the moon, young girls seduce old men such as himself (not the other way around) and that traveling there would, as Ecclitico’s scholars assure him, “bring him a great fortune.” (For his part, Ecclitico adds in an aside that he’s not interested in Buonafede’s already considerable wealth and wants only his daughter.)
In the context of the Esterházy palace, this probably all seemed like a light romantic comedy, the perfect crema on top of the wedding cake. Now, however, the clear read is in commodity fetishism. Buonafede is sold the illusory world on the moon that serves as an escape from worldly order and conformity to his own worldview. But the illusory world is just that: an illusion. Who, in 1777, could imagine a celestial body as a commodity?
In a most peculiar way
This is a theme Mozart and Da Ponte may have picked up and run with, as they did with Così, another opera about love, illusion, and deception. In The Classical Style, Charles Rosen writes of Così that the Enlightenment-era experiment it depicts requires “a closed system…the atmosphere of the rest of life is sealed off.” The same holds true for Il mondo, but with a major caveat. The world of Così is populated only by “victims and scientists” in Rosen’s words, with the men thinking at first they’re among the scientists when they are, in fact, the victims.
Conversely, Il mondo’s world is made up of just one victim, with everyone else in on the joke. Where Mozart and Da Ponte may have seen this setup as the chance to explore class and labor, as they do via the roles of Alfonso and Despina in Così — not to mention Figaro, Susanna, and Zerlina. Haydn by contrast tailors a different message to meet his court-specific medium. (In his defense, Esterházy also seemed to be a fairly even-keeled employer who paid his musicians well and even reversed his decision to fire one of his singers when he learned that she was Haydn’s mistress.)
“The artistic personality that Haydn created for himself (related to, but not to be confused with, the face he wore for everyday purposes) prevented, by its assumption of an easy-going geniality, the full development of the subversive and revolutionary aspect of his art,” Rosen concludes. “His music, as E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote, appears to have been composed before original sin.”
Whose shirts you wear
Goldoni on the other hand wasn’t a court playwright and was clearer with his political views, as well as his vision for theater as a tool for social change (a view that would lead to so great a feud with fellow playwright, Carlo Gozzi, that Goldoni would leave Italy for France). It was, to be sure, a soft power — he wasn’t so much interested in tearing down the aristocracy as he was elevating the non-noble class. Nonetheless, Margaret Coyle argues that “Goldoni was committed to the use of theatre as an idealistic mirror that reflects what should be, rather than what is,” echoing what Joseph Spencer Kennard wrote nearly a century earlier: “Goldoni directs his hardest blows against abuse of power, against meanness and every form of selfishness. Another general tendency of his is to encourage the civic virtues that make life’s burden easier to bear.”
Goldoni also had a tendency to shrug at the vagaries of history, at least according to his own memoirs (which, as we know from Casanova and Da Ponte, can be their own idealized mirrors). He lived through several wars in Italy, while maintaining “the routine of civilized existence” in Milan, as biographer Timothy Holme put it. When confronted with the Battle of San Pietro in 1734, he woke up to pandemonium as civilians fled Parma. Goldoni writes in his memoirs: “‘Whatever is afoot?’ I wondered, ‘Can this be the end of the world?’ I put my long coat over my nightshirt, went downstairs, ran along the corridors, went into the kitchen, asked, insisted, but nobody would answer.”
Finally, after running into his coachman, he was told that the Austrian army had reached the city. “Everybody is taking refuge in the churches and putting their goods under the protection of God,” he explained.
Goldoni considered this: “Do you think that the soldiers will take God into account under such circumstances? And anyway, are all the Austrians Catholics?”
There’s something wrong
“Flowers to me are God’s smile,” Katy Perry explained of her decision to bring a daisy with her on her Blue Origin space trip earlier this week. Does she think that God is smiling under such circumstances? And anyway, are all the flowers Pentecostals?
“Space travel is something Katy Perry has apparently wanted to do for decades, since she’s always been interested in astrology, astronomy, astrophysics, and Pythagoras, in no particular order,” Vrinda Jagota wrote earlier this week in a piece on the trip for Pitchfork, running under the headline, “In Space, No One Can Hear You Girlboss.” Reading this, I can’t help but hear Ecclitico’s words in my head: “Some pretend to know alchemy, some unearth ‘treasure,’ some dispense secrets, some talk about the planets… I do my part with fake astronomy.”
Like Buonafede before her, Perry allowed herself to be taken in by the moon — his commodity fetish walked so hers could run (backwards and in heels, though, because this mission was all about “making space” for women and tapping into the “feminine divine”). At least Buonafede was transparent: his trip to space was entirely about him.
Part of the giddy comedy to Il mondo della Luna, too, is the inversion of social strata. The Emperor of the Moon during the lovers’ ruse is the manservant Cecco, who immediately demands the hand of Buonafede’s maid, Lisetta — rescuing her from her boss’s leching, and adding a third wedding to the finale. It’s a clear marker of the Enlightenment era, tipping the scales of power by rewarding not the richest, but the cleverest — a chaotic good that would ultimately chafe against the ruling class’s censorship the following decade with The Marriage of Figaro.
In this Enshittenment era, however, the rich are now going to space for real. And the master manipulator isn’t a clever and charming huckster with a heart of gold. It’s Jeffrey Fucking Bezos, sending his fiancée, a pop star, and Oprah’s best friend into space for 10 minutes so that they can call themselves astronauts.
The problem with this is that we’re stuck in the experiment with them, the atmosphere of the rest of life once again sealed off. And they’re trying to still convince us that the lunatics are motivated by altruism.