About the work
Il mondo della luna is a dramma giocoso in three acts by Baldassare Galuppi to a libretto by Carlo Goldoni. It premiered on 29 January 1750 at the Teatro San Moisè in Venice, the first setting of this Goldoni text, which later composers including Joseph Haydn and Giovanni Paisiello also set to music.
Plot
The credulous Buonafede is persuaded by a man posing as an astronomer that he can travel to the moon and find there a social order more to his liking. While he believes himself in this supposedly extraterrestrial world, his daughters and their suitors exploit the deception to secure the marriages he had previously refused to allow. In the end the hoax is exposed, but Buonafede accepts the unions that have already taken place.
Cultural significance
As the first musical setting of Goldoni's lunar satire, Galuppi's version launched the fortunes of a subject that became one of the most frequently set in later eighteenth-century opera buffa. Galuppi uses the music pointedly to illustrate the text, for instance through the shifting orchestral colours of the supposed lunar world.