Haven of peaceful stillness, or omen of disaster? The most evocative music inspired by the Moon

Four and a half billion years old and over a quarter of a million miles from Earth, the Moon is our oldest and closest solar friend. Viewed from Earth, by a stroke of celestial magic, it appears as large as the distant Sun, constantly shapeshifting under the changing stellar light – the four lunar phases lasting barely seven days each.

'When it comes to mythologising the Moon, composers got there first'

While the Moon’s gravitational pull stirs the ocean tides, and its regular phases shaped our earliest calendars (and still set the date for Easter), the greatest impact on Man has been its enduring sense of mystery. For millennia we’ve mythologised the Moon, poeticised its light, traced its movements, before satisfying our curiosity and exploring its surface in 1969. But composers got there first: artistic astronomers, travellers in the boundless space of imagination, their small, pioneering steps a giant leap forward for music.

So, which composers have been inspired by our celestial near neighbour?

Schubert: songs bathed in moonlight

Franz Schubert’s songs are bathed in moonlight. Captivated by the nocturnal imagery of his poets, Schubert sought to illustrate the fleeting beauty of lunar light in the ‘flowing’, ‘shimmering’ and ‘flickering’ of his musical brush strokes. His songs also ‘walk’. ‘Gute Nacht’, from his bleakly beautiful song cycle Winterreise, takes the kind of night-time stroll beloved of Romantic poets: an introspective journey with the Moon as the lonely traveller’s sole companion.

In ‘Nacht und Träume’ (D827), the brilliance of the moonbeams stirs Schubert’s piano to a glittering stream of shimmering semiquavers, their slow harmonic rhythm and undulating figuration creating a sense of altered, frozen time. It was a technique which later composers exploited to create intense moonlit moods of wonder and delight which could easily tip over into mystery and madness (Giles Swayne captivates us like this in the middle movement of Cry, heard at the Proms in 1983 and 1994). 

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Capturing moonlight has generally led composers to sequences of gently flowing ideas, just as if they were depicting a stream of running water. It was a common poetic association which Schubert exploited to the full in Goethe’s ‘An den Mond’ (D296), where his rippling accompaniment neatly serves a dual purpose. There’s even more of this in his 1815 setting of Ludwig Hölty’s ‘An den Mond’ (D193), where the continuous flow of quavers in the piano apparently recalls Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C sharp minor Op. 27 No. 2 of 1801 – perhaps the most famous invocation of moonlight in music. 

Beethoven: a magical evocation of moonlight

The sonata’s ‘Moonlight’ nickname was not coined until 1836 – after Beethoven’s death – when one of Schubert’s poets, Ludwig Rellstab, linked Beethoven’s lilting twilit opening with the image of ‘a boat visiting, by moonlight, the primitive landscapes of Lake Lucerne’. Perhaps he knew Schubert’s setting of Hölty’s poem and unconsciously made the connection.

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Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny also heard something of the night in the music, imagining ‘a nocturnal scene in which a mournful ghostly voice sounds from the distance’. A vision made all the more atmospheric by Beethoven’s direction that ‘This whole piece is to be played with the greatest delicacy and without the dampers’ (ie with the sustaining pedal constantly down). 

This evocative smearing of harmonies, coupled with the sense of suppressed drama and icy calm, worked their magic on later generations of composers brought up in the belief that this was indeed a true Beethovenian evocation of moonlight.

Whether the impressionistic mist of sound reached as far as Debussy is arguable, though the much-loved Clair de lune from his Suite bergamasque for piano (1890) uses several similar techniques – slow-moving harmonies, step-wise motion and plenty of rippling. But it was Paul Verlaine’s Clair de lune (1869) which provided the poetic inspiration, which Debussy expanded in a pair of songs: the last, a timeless evocation of Verlaine’s vision of the lovers’ sad song ‘mingling with the calm moonlight’. 

A place of peaceful stillness

Of all the Moon’s musical moods it’s this sense of peaceful stillness which has gained greatest currency, especially when reflected in water. The famous aria ‘Song to the Moon’ from Antonín Dvořák’s opera Rusalka is sung by the title character from the solitude of a moonlit woodland lake, while Frank Bridge’s orchestral suite The Sea (1912) devotes a whole movement to ‘the sea shimmering in full moonlight’.

Its lyrical romanticism made an impression on the ten-year-old Benjamin Britten at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival in 1924. But 20 years later, his own ‘Moonlight’ interlude from the opera Peter Grimes is more precisely observed: the sea-swell mirrored in heaving chords for low strings and wind, and the flickering moonlight illuminated by darting harp and flute triplets.  

An omen of disaster and evil

Here the moonlight provides the unsettling calm before the storm – the young apprentice is dead and Grimes’s own tragedy inevitable. Moonlight is often seen as an omen of disaster and evil, especially when it leads to an eclipse. In the sumptuous Royal Ballet of the Night staged at the court of Louis XIV in 1653, the normally frigid Moon is warmed by love for a handsome shepherd and deserts the heavens to pursue him; in the eerie darkness of the resulting eclipse ‘Demons, Sorcerers and Werewolves’ are unleashed to do their worst. 

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Julian Anderson’s 1997 The Crazed Moon, commissioned for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, takes its cue from the disturbing lunar eclipse of March 1996 and a recent bereavement, weaving a funereal journey towards a central orchestral unison which, says Anderson, ‘collapses dramatically – the moment of eclipse – greeted by baying fanfares on brass’. And in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1922) another moonbeam unison accompanies Wozzeck’s murder of Marie, just as the blood-red moon rises. The Mad Moon.

'Moon-sickness': the strange dream sequences of Schoenbergs' Pierrot Lunaire

Insanity has long been blamed on moon-sickness – lunacy – a state of mind which inspired Arnold Schoenberg’s melodrama Pierrot Lunaire in 1912. He selected 21 poems by Albert Giraud to form a dream sequence in which the moonstruck Pierrot confronts elements of his own troubled fantasy. Just like Schubert, the first song ‘Mondestrunken’ (Moondrunk) depicts cascades of moonbeams using traditional means: ‘flowing’ (piano figures), ‘shimmering’ (flute trills) and ‘flickering’ (violin pizzicatos). There are familiar poetic themes too, linking water and walking with the moonlight.

But Giraud also introduces a potent new image, imagining moonbeams transformed into celestial wine drunk through the eyes, which Schoenberg paints by infusing the whole song with elements drawn from the opening bars – the intoxication of the first heady sip colouring our whole experience. In the 18th song, ‘Der Mondfleck’, Pierrot tries to rub a speck of moonlight off his back, but it won’t disappear, just like the musical figures of Schoenberg’s virtuoso counterpoint which keep on returning.  

Enter Haydn: lunar humour

The Moon has provoked much mirth – especially on stage. In Carlo Goldoni’s libretto Il Mondo della luna (The World on the Moon), the cast themselves are transported to the Moon – well, the gullible ones. It tells the story of a fake astrologer Ecclitico, who devises a cunning plan to trick the grumpy Buonafede into allowing his daughters to marry the lovers of their choice.

Il Mondo della luna was first set to music by Galuppi (Venice, 1750) who brought the house down with Bonafede’s aria describing the innumerable lunar wonders in astonished, gulped phrases, while walking with exaggerated steps on the Moon’s supposedly springy surface. 

Goldoni’s text was taken up by a wide range of composers including Haydn, who adapted it to provide some light-hearted entertainment during marriage celebrations at the Princely court of Eszterháza in 1777. Haydn’s music fully colludes in Ecclitico’s elaborate deception, beginning with gravity-defying theatrics as Buonafede – fuelled by a ‘flying elixir’ (really a sleeping potion) – makes his hallucinatory voyage to the Moon.

Craftiest of all is Haydn’s conjuration of the lunar landscape with a sequence of exotic ballet movements, including one for double orchestra with special effects for delicate strings and off-stage horns and bassoons. Ultimately Buonafede is furious to discover that the ‘Moon’ is actually Ecclitico’s garden, but Goldoni assures us that even the shortest journeys can help provide a fresh perspective on life back home. 

Janáček's drunken landlord sets off to the Moon

A century and a half later, the Moon once again played host to a curmudgeonly operatic visitor from earth. This is the anti-hero of a novel by Czech nationalist Svatopluk Čech, adapted by Leos Janáček for his comic opera The Excursion of Mr Brouček to the Moon (1920).

Mr Brouček – a drunken Prague landlord – dreams that life must surely be better on the Moon, only to find himself mysteriously borne aloft to see for himself. Something of a philistine, his delight in Janáček’s ethereal soundscape, with its spectral theme for solo violin, is short-lived, as he discovers that the Moon is populated by pretentious artistic types who hang out at the Cathedral of All Arts.

Like Haydn, Janáček writes a series of Moon dances (with a strong Czech flavour), and during the banquet of flower-scents Brouček is encouraged to sniff vigorously to the accompaniment of the Moon anthem, a parody of the Czech national song ‘My homeland’. But all this culture is too much for Brouček, who offends against lunar etiquette by mentioning his nose (prohibited on the Moon) and then outrages the vegetarian Moon-beings by snacking on sausages – cue a shocked ‘meat’ chorus. Brouček makes a swift return to Earth. 

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The Clangers: bringing Moon-landing excitement to younger audiences

So much for visitors. Without them, life and music can continue undisturbed for eons – as it has on one remote moon. Broadcast on BBC One between 1969 and ’72 (and revived in 2015), The Clangers aimed to bring the excitement of NASA’s Apollo missions to a younger audience. Written and narrated by Oliver Postgate, we meet a family of small, knitted space creatures who live on a vegetarian diet of green soup (cooked by the Soup Dragon) followed by blue string pudding.

The music – often central to the stories – was based on sketches and graphs drawn by Postage, turned into scores by the composer Vernon Elliott, and then recorded by their ‘Clanger Ensemble’ (harp, clarinet, glockenspiel and bells) with Elliott himself on bassoon.

But the most memorable sounds were those made by the Clangers themselves who spoke in their very own whistled language. Taking their lead from the rhythm and intonation of Postage’s voice-overs, these witty intonations were performed on ‘Swanee’ whistles, their rising and falling glissandos and sing-song phrases easily understood by children of all ages.

Perhaps this wasn’t so wide of the mark. On 22 May 1969 the three astronauts of the Apollo 10 lunar-orbital mission reported strange noises while they were on the dark side of the moon: ‘Do you hear that? That whistling sound?’ ‘Yes. It sounds like… outer space-type music’.