Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, all four nights of it, has four roles for baritones. A decade ago, in San Francisco, Brian Mulligan tested the waters as Donner, the god of thunder in Das Rheingold, which inaugurates the cycle, and as the feckless kinglet Gunther in Götterdämmerung, which brings it to a close. Since the pandemic, proceeding in stages, he has accomplished the quantum leap to Alberich and Wotan, the mighty opposites whose power struggle drives Wagner’s whole machine.
“The way I roll,” the strapping Irish-American baritone says, “when I’m performing a character, I’m completely monogamous. In my mind, no other exists.” That said, at the matinee of Das Rheingold at the Paris Opéra on February 2, 2025, he delivered Alberich’s seismic valedictory curse, exited, and popped right back on to relieve Iain Paterson’s Wotan (who was succumbing to the company bug du jour) for the final 45 minutes of the show, complete with the god’s rhapsodic anthem at the entry of his tribe into Valhalla.