Evelyn Lear
Evelyn Lear was an American opera singer and soprano. Born Evelyn Shulman in New York City on January 8, 1926, she studied at Hunter College, New York University, and the Juilliard School of Music, where Sergius Kagen was her mentor. At Juilliard she met baritone Thomas Stewart, whom she married in 1955. In 1957, they went to study at the Berlin University of Music on Fulbright programs.
Lear made her operatic debut as the Composer in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Deutsche Oper. Her Austrian debut came in 1960, when she sang the title role in a concert performance of Alban Berg’s Lulu. Her repertoire ranged from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro to Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, Verdi’s Otello, and Berg’s Wozzeck.
She also performed works by contemporary composers, including Kurt Weill’s Johnny Johnson, Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, Werner Egk’s The Betrothal in San Domingo, Marvin David Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra, Thomas Pasatieri’s The Seagull, and Rudolf Kelterborn’s The Cherry Orchard. Her work outside the opera house included film and theater: she played Nina Cavallini in Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) and Queen Elizabeth I in the musical Elizabeth and Essex (1989), based on a play by Maxwell Anderson.
Lear received a Grammy Award in 1966 and was named Kammersängerin by the Berlin Senate. Her career spanned 1959 to 2009. She died in Sandy Springs, Maryland, on July 1, 2012, aged 86.