“Mandryka is a big, nerdy romantic with a wicked temper. This role is probably the greatest sing I’ve ever experienced. There are huge, heartfelt passages, and then these incredibly intimate, earnestly whispered exchanges with Arabella. And it’s all so beautiful.”
San Francisco Classical Voice
Most male characters in opera are either heroes or villains. Among the rest, there is Arabella’s good-bad-good Mandryka. Baritone Brian Mulligan, memorable here in 2012 in the title role of John Adams’s Nixon in China, sings the male lead role in the upcoming San Francisco production of Richard Strauss’s Arabella, and in his opinion:
“Like any real person, Mandryka is not all good or all bad. He’s a man with many obvious imperfections, but that just makes him all the more relatable and easy to love. He’s a big teddy bear… but he’s still got his claws!”
The character that seems real to the singer who will portray him is the creation of Strauss librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a major literary figure in Vienna a century ago. Into the story about romantic complications in the lives of the sisters Arabella (Ellie Dehn) and Zdenka (Heidi Stober) enters the Croatian landowner with the rough exterior and apparently noble heart, often portrayed — and certainly regarded by Arabella — as a lovable sort of bear. Hofmannsthal describes his appearance as “a very strong, elegant man of at most 35, somewhat indefinable; rural in appearance, very well dressed, without any provincial elegance.” That is also Mulligan’s view, although the music is more in his focus:
“Mandryka is a big, nerdy romantic with a wicked temper. This role is probably the greatest sing I’ve ever experienced. There are huge, heartfelt passages, and then these incredibly intimate, earnestly whispered exchanges with Arabella. And it’s all so beautiful.”
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