“What time does the next rocket leave?" asked the critic in the Austrian daily Kurier at theend of an enthusiastic review of this celebratory production of Haydn's heart-warming comedy. But one of the beauties of Haydn's score is that there are no rockets, no shooting off into space - the characters never leave the earth, after all - but only the gentlest of journeys as over-protective father Buonafede rises a few feet off the ground in his garden chair to the uncanny sound of muted strings. And for all the modern electrical accoutrements displayed onstage, with the Concentus Musicus Wien in the pit and Nikolaus Harnoncourt on the podium, authentic period wooden mutes are, naturally, used to create this magical effect. The Theater an der Wien production of Il mondo della luna was mounted to celebrate the 80th birthday (actually falling the day after the premiere) of one of the founding fathers of historically informed performance, and in such details - and the vivid playing of the orchestral movements that pepper the score, such as the Baroque-inflected intermezzo at the beginning of Act III - Harnoncourt's integrity and energy remain undimmed by the years.
Haydn had chosen a libretto by Carlo Goldoni in 1768 for his first opera in the theatre built by his employer, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, at the family's vast summer residence, and it was to Goldoni that the composer returned for this dramma giocoso performed in August 1777. Dating back a quarter of a century to the time of the Venetian dramatist's greatest prose comedies and initially set by Galuppi, the libretto takes the ordinary people beloved of Goldoni and adds an element of fantasy that ultimately serves to reinforce good sense and good nature. Haydn made his setting for the all-Italian ensemble that had just been established at the Esterházy palace, and the casting includes a part for a castrato (the romantic hero Ernesto), a voice-type that most obviously represents the serious operatic strain, which, in this kind of opera, shares the stage with characters from the comic tradition. Similarly, the mounting excitement of the second-act finale, ending with Buonafede's humiliation, is a vital component of the evolving Italian comic-opera style that reaches a frenzied peak in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro nine years later but carries on all the way to the mid-19th century and Donizetti's Don Pasquale.
The journey that Buonafede makes is, as producer Tobias Moretti has stressed, not out of this world but into himself, and it is redolent of the authors' faith in humanity that, in Moretti's words, he is able to "face his desires and fears and come back to the world a changed man". In this staging, the short recitative scene that begins the third act is reduced to the character's key phrase, “Da uom sopralunar oprar vogliamo" - let's behave like the man on the moon - while German bass-baritone Dietrich Henschel hauls himself up the scaffolding with impressive acrobatic skill. Harnoncourt, for his part, has made a speciality of Haydn's operas, with productions of the heroic Armida and Orlando paladino as well as the comedy L'infedeltà delusa performed in concert in Vienna during the same period of birthday celebrations. Given the conductor's firm belief in the modernity of Haydn's operas - "as if he were looking ahead across centuries" - it is only appropriate that the staging should avoid all 18th-century quaintness and provide the hair-gelled, medallion-wearing Ecclitico with some very convincing moon-watching technology.
If Henschel's central hangdog performance was singled out for praise in the press, his tormentors likewise impressed for "the exemplary way their singing and acting went hand in hand", in the words of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, with a special mention for "the subtle Ernesto of Vivica Genaux and the supremely agile dream-seller Ecclitico of Bernard Richter".

Posing as an astronomer, Ecclitico manages to convince the gullible Buonafede of his extraordinary technical wizardry and proceeds to show his victim what appearto be scenes of life on the moon that support Buonafede's particularly unreconstructed views on women. The financial reward that Ecclitico receives as a result, however, is of less interest than his true goal, which is to marry Buonafede's daughter Clarice. Ernesto has similar feelings for Clarice's sister Flaminia, and his servant Cecco is likewise in love with Buonafede's maid Lisetta; and while the two young men are up against the opposition of a father who harbours aspirations for his daughters, Buonafede himself has designs on Lisetta. Ecclitico, however, has an idea of how to make good use of the money he has received.
Both daughters are anxious to escape their father's tyranny into the arms of the men they love. Ecclitico arrives with a potion that he claims will allow Buonafede to travel with him to the moon, and the old man falls for the trap, swallows the potion and loses consciousness.
Having created an imaginary moonscape in the garden, Ecclitico wakes Buonafede and then entertains him with various charades, including the grand arrival of the Emperor of the Moon (a disguised Cecco) and the star Hesperus (Ernesto). Everything seems to confirm the view of life on the moon that Buonafede witnessed from earth, particularly men's domination of women, but with the arrival of his daughters, Buonafede finds himself duped into giving his assent to their marrying the men of their choice. Now that their goal has been achieved, the conspirators declare that “the comedy is over", and the truth finally dawns on Buonafede. Resigning himself to giving up his former heavy-handed approach, he consents to the lovers following their heans, this time back “on earth".