At the time of this writing, Brian Mulligan is wrapping up a 16-month period in which he added an astonishing 10 roles to his repertoire. Knowing that I’d be interviewing him for the benefit of an audience of opera singers in the early stages of their educations and careers, I decided to kick off our conversation by asking how he had become so confident and efficient about learning new roles. Mulligan let out a boisterous baritone chuckle and responded, “Every time I sit down to learn a new role—no matter how big or small it is—every single time I think, there’s no possible way I’m ever going to be able to do this! I can’t do this!”
Mulligan’s original plan to debut eight roles within this time frame already stretched the limits of what he felt he could manage, but he worked out a detailed long-term plan that allowed him to feel confident that he could show up for each production thoroughly prepared. “I knew exactly how I was going to do everything . . . and then there were two surprises that threw everything off.”
Two houses that Mulligan has a long history with found themselves in need of a baritone on short notice, adding two additional role debuts to the list: Amfortas in Frankfurt’s Parsifal and the title role in Sweeney Todd for San Francisco. “They’re both absolute dream roles that I will kill to do until my dying day,” he says. “Sometimes the opportunities are just too great to turn down.”
I first heard Mulligan sing at the Aspen Music Festival in 2002. He appeared as the Count in Le nozze di Figaro and instantly set the standard against which I have measured all subsequent interpretations of the role. Mulligan brought a dramatic depth and poignant humanity to a character who often comes across as shallow, aristocratic, and misogynist. His beautiful voice, earnest musicianship, and range of emotional nuance made me care about the man whose urges and insecurities have wreaked chaos in his household—and, as a result, I experienced all of the other characters and their relationships with him in a fresh and riveting way.
In the years since, I have come to appreciate the deeply personal approach and attention to detail that Mulligan brings to every opera role he inhabits. While his essential sound is immediately recognizable, the specificity with which Mulligan physically and vocally defines his characters confers upon each a unique palate of vocal colors. His Hamlet sounds nothing like his Enrico, and his Nixon demonstrates a remarkably contrasting deployment of English from his Sweeney Todd.
Mulligan’s meticulous approach to the creative process makes it all the more remarkable that he managed to breathe life into so many characters in so short a period of time. But when you consider how long it has taken for his voice to mature to the point that he can excel at the dramatic baritone roles that were always destined to be his specialty, it becomes clear that skill at learning new roles has been essential for his survival in the interim.
A dramatic baritone in the early stages of his career will learn and likely outgrow many roles while his voice and career evolve. Many of the roles that inspired Mulligan to become an opera singer are still in his future. “I imagine that all singers wonder, ‘When will I mature into being able to sing this role?’ There’s finally this whole world of dramatic and Helden baritone repertoire that I’m ready to head into. I’m thrilled to be able to sing it but, again, it is all new! At least I’ve got my system down now for learning music. I know how to do it.”
No matter how much talent, polish, and ambition a singer has upon completing their training, the transition to a full-time performance career is never smooth or easy. “I think the hardest thing to understand for most young singers, the most difficult to accept, is when is your voice going to peak?” Mulligan says. A coloratura soprano may be able to turn in world-class performances in her 20s and 30s, but this often is not the case for heavier voices. “Just because you’re all in school at the same time, and you’re the same age, and you have the same education . . . There are going to be people who you’re with who skyrocket immediately out of school because that’s what their voice is. But patience is something that I still have to remind myself to practice.”
Mulligan accepted a weekly contract at the Metropolitan Opera, being assigned small roles and covers, while he was still a graduate student at the Juilliard School. But it would be quite a while before he would take on a role of any significance at the Met. The timbre and heft of his voice made him unsuited for many of the roles offered to baritones as emerging artists. “I realized I was never going to get cast as Papageno, even though I’d be an adorable Papageno! My voice just wasn’t really right for it. So I was passed over for a lot of those roles that would traditionally be given to a younger baritone.”
As impatient as Mulligan has been to take on Iago and the Dutchman, he refused to allow himself to be discouraged, developing a keen affinity for contemporary music. “I wasn’t ready to sing the Dutchman, but I was ready to sing Klinghoffer, Nixon, and Prospero. There are so many things you can do in the mean time to challenge yourself, and I think that’s one of the ways that I have bided my time, if you can consider it that (because it’s not!) is turning to new music.”
Mulligan’s dramatic intensity and the success in works of composers like Adams and Adès made him an obvious choice to create the role of Jack Torrance in Paul Moravec’s opera on The Shining, which received its premiere at Minnesota Opera last May. For Mulligan, it was like the fulfillment of a long-held fantasy. He had grown up reading Stephen King’s books. “My parents limited my TV, but they let me read whatever I wanted. So of course I chose the most grotesque, terrifying things I could find! The Shining was a favorite of mine for years.”
He describes the opera, which is based on the book rather than the Stanley Kubrick film, as “unlike any other I’ve ever seen or done. It goes by incredibly quickly—the whole thing with intermission is only about two hours long.” The sold-out run was a critical success, with plenty of praise offered for Mulligan’s performance. “As Jack Torrance, Brian Mulligan does the seemingly impossible—he actually makes you forget Jack Nicholson,” Joshua Rosenblum wrote in his review for Opera News. “Possessed of an imposing build and a rugged, perfectly articulated baritone, Mulligan lets us see that Jack is fighting forces beyond his control.”
Mulligan’s strategy for physically embodying characters has evolved over the years. He begins his preparation with exhaustive character research and striving to immerse himself in their psyche. “I develop a kind of psychological profile or map of the character I’m playing: What’s important to him? What does he want to accomplish? What are his fears? What is in his heart?”
But the practical preparation begins with meeting the vocal demands of each role. Mulligan gets the music completely in his voice before rehearsals begin. He then vocally marks initial staging rehearsals in order to allow the character to develop a vocabulary of body language and begin to take him over. Only once he feels like he is physically embodying the role does he resume singing full out, discovering new vocal sounds emerging from his character’s postures and mannerisms.
One of the things Mulligan found most satisfying about The Shining was the idea of playing a man having a psychological breakdown. “So many operas are about women having ‘the vapors,’ but for a man to really get to do it is like a dream come true,” Mulligan says. Jack Torrance is only the most recent addition to the growing list of unhinged characters he has played in recent seasons, which includes the title role in Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet, Roderick Usher in Debussy’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Enrico in Lucia di Lammermoor (who is nearly as mad as his sister in David Alden’s production) and, of course, Sweeney Todd.
Mulligan’s most satisfying characterizations are those that emerge from strong collaborations with directors and colleagues, and his Sweeney resulted from an exceptional synergy. “I spent a lot of time leading up to it, as much as I could on short notice, making decisions about him—but when I got into rehearsals, it evolved into this completely different person. He was so much more dangerous and heartbroken and devastated than I could have imagined, and it was through working with Stephanie Blythe and our wonderful director Lee Blakeley, as well as [conductor] Patrick Summers.” However, as a long-time admirer of Blythe’s singing, it took a concerted effort for him to put “Fan Brian” aside in order to fully inhabit his role. “Sweeney is constantly thinking, ‘Must kill! Must save my daughter!’” Mulligan points out. “He doesn’t think very much about Mrs. Lovett at all!”
Mulligan relished adding an iconic American musical theatre role to his repertoire. “I always knew how much I loved singing in English, how much I love being an American and singing American works. But it wasn’t until recently that I understood just how important it is to me.” An enthusiastic champion of contemporary art song and concert music, Mulligan is looking forward to the upcoming release of his debut album, a recording of two Dominick Argento song cycles with pianist Timothy Long. Their performances of The Andrée Expedition and From the Diary of Virginia Woolf will be available in early 2017.
Having successfully navigated the 14 years since the completion of formal study and the dawn of his mature career, Mulligan seeks opportunities to support young singers facing a similar transition. “One thing that I specifically say to young baritones—I can say it now because of where I am—I didn’t really have my very top secured until I was in my early 30s. I could still sing high notes, but I was frightened of Gs and A-flats. That’s really just about maturing. You can’t make your voice do it. I still have a fabulous teacher who taught me everything, so it wasn’t a technical thing, it was a developing, maturing thing. And then all of a sudden it worked. I didn’t really change anything—I just grew.”
Mulligan exudes gratitude for voice teacher, W. Stephen Smith, as well as his manager Matthew Horner for believing in and supporting him over the years it has taken for his voice to mature. He knows that not all singers are so fortunate. “I wish there was more encouragement for young dramatic voices and more opportunities for them to bide their time and grow. The opera world needs Isoldes, we need Otellos, we need Iagos, we need Wotans, and they’re really not ready until they’re in their 40s. So how do you survive until then?”
The past year has presented rewarding opportunities for Mulligan to reconnect with valued colleagues from his earliest days of professional performing, all the more enjoyable because the vocal heft and maturity he now enjoys enables him to step into the leading roles everyone had long anticipated hearing him perform. “Tamara Wilson and I did an Aida together last summer at Aspen. It was really lovely—we grew up together, we’ve known each other this whole time, and finally she was Aida and I was her dad. I had a ball singing with her.”
Wilson recalls performing Der Kaiser von Atlantis with Mulligan in 2006. “I was still part of the Houston Grand Opera Studio at the time and was added to the cast last minute because of the other soprano’s scheduling conflict,” Wilson says. “When I heard Brian for the first time, I was blown away. Not just by the sheer size of his voice, which is notably huge, but by the unique and enticing quality of his tone.”
Wilson was delighted when she learned they would reunite at Aspen. “He was doing his first Amonasro while I was on my 30th or so Aida,” she says. “I’ve heard some amazing Amonasros before, but I had never heard anyone do it like him. It was so free, and the intention was always there. He gives so much intensity that it raises the level of every singer’s performance around him.”
Mulligan also rejoined the roster of the Metropolitan Opera last season, appearing as Paolo Albiani in Simon Boccanegra alongside Plácido Domingo in the title role and Ferruccio Furlanetto as Jacopo Fiesco, with James Levine conducting. “Furlanetto is a hero of mine, and I cannot even tell you how amazingly generous he was with me. And so was Domingo, and so was Levine,” Mulligan says. “We spent a lot of time in music rehearsals. . . . You think of ‘Boccanegra’ as this grand opera, and it is—but it’s also just these five or six characters, and the rehearsals were very intimate. I was incredibly inspired by them all.”
Singing Verdi at the Met has confirmed to Mulligan and his team that the time has come to step into the roles he has waited his whole career to essay. “Because Paolo is so villainous, after Simon Boccanegra a lot of people were asking about Scarpia and about Iago, and that’s really exciting. I can’t wait to sing those roles.”
Becoming a full-fledged dramatic baritone, of course, means cracking the spines of a new stack of opera scores. “It always seems so daunting and impossible, to have this enormous, 300-page book in a foreign language with all these little scratching notes and symbols that you have to memorize!” he says. “It just seems so impossible to me. But I always do it. It takes a lot of time, but I always do it!”
