I first saw Brian Sullivan in the mid-’50s in two roles, Lohengrin and Tamino (the latter, sung in English, also on a Met Record Club release), that were once thought of as companionable, undertaken in the natural course of events by such tenors as Leo Slezak, Jacques Urlus, and Karl Jörn, which is to say by dramatic tenors who could sing lyrically. Sullivan was tall and handsome, and most of his early professional work was in musicals in California, much of it with Richard Lert’s American Music Theater. But Lert, an Austrian-born conductor, also led classical concerts, and among those was a 1941 performance of Handel’s Belshazzar, in which Sullivan appeared in the company of Charles Kullman and Elizabeth Rethberg (some of her very last engagements were with Lert’s forces). A recording of that, released in the ’50s on the EJS “pirate” label, is so far as I’m aware the earliest sample we have of Sullivan’s singing. (I’ve owned the LP since its issue, but at the moment am unable to get back to it to refresh my impressions.) Following his Met debut in 1948, he was quite busy with the company through the 1950s, singing both Eisenstein and Alfred (not at once) in many a Fledermaus, an uncommonly full-voiced Narraboth, Admète in Alceste, and Grigori in Boris Godunov, in addition to the major assignments mentioned above. He was the Rodolfo of the NBC-TV telecast of La Bohème (like all the network’s opera productions, live and sung in English), on which he sounds in easy command.

A poorly managed final B-flat in the Flower Song excepted, Sullivan sails along through the first two acts of this Carmen. His voice sounds youthful, impressing at times as an improbably ample Irish tenor, but with a good ring at the top. The rather uncommon combination of size and headiness, not unlike that of Sullivan’s contemporary Richard Cassilly at a comparable career point, enables some lovely voix-mixte moments, as at the end of the duet with Micaëla, and the healthy upper range suggests why the Young Heroic and spinto categories beckoned. Acts 3 and 4, though, prove parlous. Most of the voice is still sounding well, but from the confrontation with Carmen at the end of Act 3 onward, he is obliged to cut short, indicate, or omit altogether important forte top notes. Paray’s forced pace in the last scene gives him no time to re-set and mobilize for the next onslaught. The performance as a whole reflects the general impression of his career, which is of a singer with a fine voice, a lyrical musicality, and a likable presence, but one who, whether for vocal or temperamental reasons (and unlike Cassilly, who muscled his way through a lengthy career with some notable high points), never got consistently on top of some of the stylistic and linguistic markers that make for distinguished interpretation, and whose voice could not always follow through with more dramatic demands. He was soon essaying Otello and the heavier Wagner roles—surely not a likely direction for him—and his early death is ascribed to career-despondency suicide.