Dark Was the Night: on the Voyager Mission The Paris Review Daily The first piece for my column, Songs to the Moon” If the inhabitants of other stars should spot the Voyager 1 interstellar probe zooming past—if they capture it and assemble its onboard audio player—and if they have ears to hear, they might puzzle over this message from the Queen of the Night: “The vengeance of hell boils in my heart, Death and despair blaze around me!” Perhaps these German-speaking aliens will visit Earth to eradicate the threat posed by Mozart’s 1791 aria. Or maybe they’ll thrill to the prospect of subscribing to the Bavarian State Opera, only to discover that the soprano Edda Moser, who performed the recording they’d heard, had retired five billion years earlier, in 1999. Back to Essays & Stories Image: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Stage set for Mozart’s The Magic Flute, 1815