Offenbach wrote Le voyage dans la lune (1875) during the last decade of his life, a time when he was undergoing both physical and financial crises. He had been forced to sell the Theatre de la Gaite—which he had hoped would become an influential force in French musical theater under his direction—and his gout and arthritis caused him nearly constant pain.

While taking the waters at Aix-le-Bain to ease his gout, Offenbach set out to solve his fiscal troubles by writing three operettas at once, an effort that yielded La boulangère à des écus, La créole (The Commodore), and the present work. Voyage, inspired by the fantastic novels of Jules Verne, was a groundbreaking science fiction spectacular. Because Offenbach seems to have placed particular emphasis on the music that was to have accompanied the special visual effects, the work is best encountered in its original context, rather than shorn of its visual component. The level of musical craftsmanship does, in any event, reflect the hand of a composer backed by decades of experience, a composer who had by that time become a vital force in the life of French musical theater.

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