Very Moonish

Four years before he died, Franz Joseph Haydn sat down to compile a "Catalogue of those Compositions which I recall offhand having composed from my 18th year to my 73rd year." Among the many string quartets, concertos and pieces for a musical clock, the old man dimly remembered some 118 symphonies (latest scholarly count: 104) and half a dozen operas, including one, L'Infedelta Fedele, which musicologists are now sure he never wrote. Last week, however, Manhattan music lovers and critics alike pounded their palms over one he both wrote and remembered.

Last summer, Director Max Leavitt of the Lemonade Opera Company, who in three years had dug up such old and new operas as Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona and Prokofiev's The Duenna (TIME, June 14, 1948), was scratching his head for a surprise for his 1949 season. A friend told him about Haydn's 172-year-old dramma giocoso II Mondo della Luna (The World of the Moon), wherein a charlatan astronomer and some frolicsome servants persuade a fat, foolish father to bless the marriage of his daughter to a poet by taking him on a trip to the moon. It sounded like fun, but the first problem was to find the score. Il Mondo had been resurrected in Germany in 1932, but had never been produced in the U.S. Leavitt finally found the German version through a Manhattan publisher, changed the name to The Man in the Moon, and set about squeezing it down for Lemonade Opera.

He could hardly have squeezed better. And on opening night last week, a jam-packed audience in the Lemonader's little opera house in the basement of the (Greenwich) Village Presbyterian Church let him know it.

Haydn's gaily rippling score had lost little of its sparkle in an arrangement for two pianos. The staging moved apace, with six zanies shifting the scenery in amusing dance patterns while the play went on. No voices were outstanding, but Haydn's rollicking ensembles and the well-rehearsed way the Lemonaders sang them were the hit of the show. Next biggest hit: the eminently singable, notably contemporary English libretto of onetime Berlin Music Critic John Gutman, who now has a job in Manhattan's Wall Street. Sample, from a quintet pondering the advisability of admitting the miserly father to the "harmonious" life on the moon:

Before we decide, you see, We have to check his loyalty. He may be guilty of many Un-moonish activities.

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