Frank Mullings
Frank Mullings (born in Walsall on March 10 1881 – died in Manchester on May 19 1953) was a leading English tenor with Sir Thomas Beecham's Beecham Opera Company and British National Opera Company in the 1910s and 1920s. Blessed with a strong stage presence, his repertoire included such taxing dramatic parts as Tristan in Tristan und Isolde, Radames in Aida, the title role in Otello, and Canio in Pagliacci.[1]
Mullings studied singing in Birmingham and made his operatic début in Coventry in 1907 in Faust by Gounod. He joined the Denhof Opera Company in 1913, was engaged by the Beecham Opera Company from 1916 to 1921, and was with the British National Opera Company from 1922 until its closure in 1929. He was the first to sing the part of Wagner's Parsifal in English, which he did at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1919. Mullings was a noted interpreter, in England at least, of Verdi's Otello as well as Tristan by Wagner.[2] He created the role of Hadyar in Nail by Isidore de Lara, and the role of Apollo in Alkestis by Rutland Boughton.[3]
The English music critic Neville Cardus, who came to know Mullings well, wrote that: “Mr. Mullings acted Canio in Pagliacci far beyond the plane of conventional Italian opera of the blood and sand order. His singing is not exactly all honey, but how intensely he lived in the part! He almost persuades us that there is real tragedy about –- that if the puppet Canio were pricked, blood and not sawdust would come forth.”[1]
At the height of his fame, Mullings joined the teaching staff of the Birmingham School of Music, working there from 1927 through to 1946. He also taught at the Royal Manchester College of Music from 1944 to 1949. Mullings died at the age of 72. His voice is preserved in a number of 78-rpm gramophone recordings which testify to the sincerity of his interpretations but highlight the limitations of his strenuous vocal technique, as hinted at politely by Cardus in the quotation cited above.
References
- Scott, Michael, The Record of Singing, Volume Two, 1914-1925 (Duckworth, London, 1979), pp. 169-170.
- Rosenthal, Harold & Warrack, John, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera, second edition (Oxford University Press, London, 1980), under "Mullings, Frank".