Unsuk Chin’s new opera conveys, with uncanny precision, the restless energies inside a person’s head.
Called “Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes” (“The Dark Side of the Moon”), the work premiered on Sunday at the Hamburg State Opera in Germany. It’s a reinterpretation of the Faust myth, drawing loose inspiration from a famous series of letters between the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.
This is Chin’s second opera, following “Alice in Wonderland,” which was first performed at the Bavarian State Opera in 2007. It was as kinetic as her new one, though sillier, more eclectic and ultimately more haunting.
“Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes” centers on a character called Dr. Kieron, sung by the baritone Thomas Lehman. He is an irascible yet brilliant scientist whose harsh perfectionism masks a fragmenting mental state. Searching for human connection and trying to slow the ferocious pace of his thoughts, he falls prey to a cynical, Nietzsche-quoting faith healer, Master Astaroth, performed by the baritone Bo Skovhus.
At the start of the opera, Dr. Kieron’s sung text shows a confident man with bristly charisma. He mocks his assistant, his students and his colleagues with laser wit; In response, they grudgingly praise his intellect. Later, in a seedy bar, he entertains the other patrons with ludicrous tall tales that they believe despite themselves. Dr. Kieron’s behavior recalls Pauli, who dismissed bad science by saying it was “not even wrong,” but also Chin’s teacher, the composer Gyorgy Ligeti. “Ligeti was the harshest critic you could ever imagine,” she has said, “not only toward his students, but to his colleagues and himself.”
Chin’s music takes us into Dr. Kieron’s psyche, and it’s an exhausting place. Melodic fragments flare up and burst; orchestral registers and timbres shift constantly. The score shows a mind that can’t stay still. No wonder Dr. Kieron searches for solace with Master Astaroth, whose therapy-speak pronouncements seem profound when accompanied by blessedly static, ethereal music.
“Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes” is a work of restless sonic invention. Dr. Kieron suffers because his mind can’t linger, and neither can Chin’s musical imagination. Between the two structural poles of crackling energy and eerie stillness, Chin finds more than enough fascinating sounds for the opera’s three-and-a-half-hour running time (including intermission). In the bar scene, she writes exquisitely fragmented dance music, filtered as if through a hazy cloud of morning-after memories. A dream-world character called the Bright Girl (the soprano Narea Son) sings delicate pricks of notes. The perception makes them into melody, as it makes shapes out of groups of stars. Gently pulsing string harmonics make us mourn the loss of the Creature of Light (the tenor Andrew Dickinson), another dream figure whom Dr. Kieron treats like an old friend.
The opera’s premiere was staged by the theater collective Dead Centre, with a set that was austere but memorable, emphasizing the work’s sense of cosmic isolation and the overlap between the pregnant symbols of physics and Jungian psychology. The Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra, under Kent Nagano, who also led Chin’s “Alice in Wonderland,” played her painstakingly orchestrated music with vigor and transparency.
Singing the score was a monumental task, and while the cast contributed beautifully, they occasionally seemed overwhelmed. And at times, their voices were swallowed by the stage. Close-up video feeds showed the kind of operatic overacting that often results from insecurity. Lehman, present almost constantly, tackled his vast role gamely, but suffered the occasional memory lapse.
That was understandable, given the sheer amount of text in the opera. The first hour or so of the work crackled with energy. As it progressed, though, the piece slowly collapsed under the weight of its leaden libretto.
Those problems began in the fifth scene, a long dialogue between Dr. Kieron and Master Astaroth in which the rational scientist gradually gives in to the charlatan’s charms. What should have felt like a seduction got bogged down in clunky exposition. “I am so often considered, unfairly, a bad philosopher, a charlatan even,” Master Astaroth sings. “So unfair! Of course I do not wish to be anything inferior.”
Chin served as her own librettist, in collaboration with the writer and dramaturg Kerstin Schüssler-Bach. The German-language text has memorable moments, with wry jokes and light parody of Central European social mores. But it is largely overwrought, and there is also simply too much of it. By the end of the piece, the text, including an “Oppenheimer”-style subplot about an “ultimate bomb,” feels crammed into the shrinking musical space. (When a new opera contains lots of quick, half-spoken, half-sung prose, it’s usually a sign that the deadline was approaching.)
There are also numerous small text-setting mistakes, which became distracting as they accumulated on Sunday. Chin’s vocal lines often emphasized the wrong syllable in the word. And the bloated writing felt especially jarring in the context of music that never lost its agility, subtlety and capacity to surprise.
“Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes” began remarkably attuned to the ferocious energy of the imperceptible, illustrating the physical and physic forces that lurk beneath the surface of the world. The music offered a vivid window into the unsaid and the unsayable. But by the end, the words had said so much they overwhelmed that music.
“When the full moon is out like tonight, I can’t observe any stars anyway,” Dr. Kieron sings early in the opera. “The full moon outshines all the stars in the night sky.”
Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes
Through June 5 at the Hamburg State Opera, Germany; staatsoper-hamburg.de.
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