In Goethe's work, the seeker of meaning is less talkative – a modern Faust opera by Unsuk Chin

Everyone took their hats off to Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli was one of the pioneering physicists of the 20th century – someone who interacted on an equal footing with greats like Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Niels Bohr. Robert Oppenheimer, once again in everyone's spotlight as the "father of the atomic bomb" thanks to Christopher Nolan's film 2023, received important inspiration from this brilliant thinker during Pauli's time at ETH Zurich, whom even the academic world, quite unscientifically, declared a genius.

He would prove that even God had made calculation errors in creation, his envious opponents quipped. But the genius, whose work on quantum mechanics actually provided essential answers to the question of what holds the world together at its core, had a dark side. And on top of that, the 1945 Nobel Prize winner was apparently a complete creep. Pauli didn't mince words with students and colleagues when their theories seemed to him to have been thought through. Einstein had "spewed terrible nonsense" in Berlin, he wrote in 1929, demonstratively unimpressed, about the latest research by the founder of the theory of relativity.

Behind the harsh facade, however, lay a fragile, deeply vulnerable personality. Haunted throughout his life by oppressively intense dream visions, Pauli repeatedly plunged into alcoholism and other excesses during his early years in Hamburg, mostly—namely, the omen—in the red-light district of St. Pauli. The struggle with his inner demons ultimately brought him into contact with the Swiss analyst and Freudian antipode Carl Gustav Jung. The correspondence between the two spanned almost three decades, until Pauli's death in Zurich in 1958. It bears witness to his struggle with the certainties of science—and with himself.

Composer Unsuk Chin has now made this dazzling personality the main character of a stage work entitled "The Dark Side of the Moon," which premiered on Sunday at the Hamburg State Opera. Chin has been leading the Composer Seminar at the Lucerne Festival with Dieter Ammann since 2023 and was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the unofficial Nobel Prize for music, last year. After her imaginative first opera, "Alice in Wonderland," in 2007, Chin has now turned to the natural sciences, and within this sphere she discovers the constellations for a modern Faust drama.

Especially in the encounter between Pauli and Jung, the libretto, written by Chin himself, reveals parallels to the seduction of Faust, the seeker of meaning, by Mephistopheles. The analyst encourages the scientist to accept his exuberant dreams as the flip side of his personality. At the same time, however, he undermines his researcher's worldview, which is focused on absolute objectivity. This contradiction breaks Pauli, who is called Doctor Kieron in the libretto but is clearly identified through an allusion to the surname Pascheles, which his Jewish ancestors abandoned.

Chin's ambitious libretto, peppered with further allusions, such as to Goethe's "Faust" plays, and all sorts of insider jokes, simultaneously reveals itself as the weak point of the new work. The characters talk and talk, and they delight in their more or less witty monologuing so much that the stage action repeatedly comes to a standstill. At times, even the prompter becomes a reluctant participant, for such vast amounts of text, mostly recited like a melodrama rather than sung, would be a challenge even for experienced actors. It's surprising that no one prevented the composer from making this mistake during the production process.

The dramaturgy's failure is particularly regrettable because the framework is right: The concept of this "Faust" paraphrase is brilliant; the idea of ​​mirroring the biography of a modern scientist—especially this one—with the parable, known since the Middle Ages, about the limits and depths of our thirst for knowledge seems coherent. But once again, it becomes clear: a good concept doesn't guarantee a successful evening of opera if you ignore a law of the opera genre that has held true since its inception. It states: Don't just let your characters chatter about their thoughts and feelings, but show them on stage, let them sing about them—the music will always be more eloquent than any bon mot.

Unsuk Chin possesses the compositional means to do this – she demonstrates this in the more powerful moments, when she relies on the interplay of music and stage. For example, when Kieron, alias Pauli, bravely spoken and sung by Thomas Lehman, encounters his Jungian anima in the form of countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim. Or when the analyst, known here as Master Astaroth, drops the mask of a miracle healer for bored society ladies towards the end and reveals himself as a seducer of souls. Baritone Bo Skovhus, steeled in all the devil and Wozzeck roles of musical theater, gives us a glimpse in this dense finale of how powerful the opera could be if the composer had earlier curbed the torrent of words.

At least Unsuk Chin is in luck with the Hamburg production: Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel of the Dead Centre directing collective masterfully translate the plot into a dreamlike sequence of scenes with recurring visual motifs that provide orientation. And Kent Nagano, who is leaving the State Opera after ten years as General Music Director, ignites a sparkling play of colors with the richly staffed orchestra, which simultaneously demonstrates Chin's mastery of the large apparatus. But all the magic is in vain. If the composer doesn't take another self-critical look at the red pen, this Faust, too, will disappear unredeemed into obscurity. And this time, it wouldn't be his fault.