I'm talking about the totally delightful, charming, wonderful Evelyn
Lear, who gave a talk, I could hardly call it a "lecture" at the Levine
School of Music in Washington last night under the auspices of the Wagner
Society of Washington, DC.

While, as I've said before, I don't claim to be a reporter, I'll try to
describe here my recollections of the captivating evening to which she
treated us.

She was introduced by the Society's chairman, Jim Holman, not only as
a renowned opera singer but as a friend, a person w/ a sense of humor
reflected in e-mailed jokes not really fit for repetition before a mixed
audience, devoted, aside from her music, to her family (her opera singer
husband, Thomas Stewart, her children and grandchildren) and to golf.

Ruffles and flourishes, a recording on a sound track from hell, a
static-drowned air-check from an AM broadcast perhaps, not recognizable
by me until the singer's voice finally prevails over the accompanying
cacophony, "Sei mir gegruesst", reminding us that we should have been
hearing "Dich teuere Halle" from *Tannhaeuser*, at the conclusion of
which Ms.  Lear made her entrance...w/ a golf club.  Testing the fickle
mike she asked, "Can you hear me?" Someone from the back called out,
"No!" She replied, "Then I'll leave." Laughter, the mike gets fixed,
and the fun began.

She told us how she began singing her mother's coloratura repertoire
at age three, developing a mezzo voice as she got older enabling the
two to sing duets.  Her parents had her learn the piano.  She went to
Interlochen at 16, where, pursuing a crush an a 17-year old French horn
player, she took up the French horn as a second instrument, w/out getting
the young man to notice her.  From there, she went to Tanglewood (Lukas
Foss, Walter Hendl, and Leonard Bernstein, w/ whom she was in love but
it didn't get anywhere), and on to Juilliard, where she met Thomas
Stewart, whom she married.

After being in a musical that opened and closed in Boston, she and
her husband went to Berlin on a Fullbright.  As she explained, there
were only about three opera houses in the USA at the time and the only
place for aspiring opera singers to have reasonable chances of employment
was in Europe.  Stewart was engaged by the Deutsche Oper Berlin to sing
in *Ariadne*.  "Does anybody here not know *Ariadne*?" she asked us.
When nobody replied, she said, "You're just ashamed!" and successfully
auditioned for the role of the young boy Komponist (composer).  As soon
as she said "Komponist" she became the strutting boy barely out of
adolescence and indeed, to audition for the part, she had secured a
costume of male livery of the 17th century at Berlin's KDW (a department
store, Kaufhaus des Westens), in which she swaggered to her audition
while her competitors were six demure ladies in heels and knit dresses.
She got the part.  "Just a girl from Brooklyn," she said, "who didn't
know better." Asked what roles she could sing, she replied, "Desdemona,
Traviata, and Trovatore".  Someone asked, "What, no *Tristan*?" She did
get to sing together w/ her husband who, turning his back to the audience,
faced her, winked, and whispered "Fabulous!"

She wanted to branch out into recitals and introduced herself to an
agent (*the* agent?) as "Evelyn Lear, the famous opera soprano", and was
asked her repertoire.  She replied, "Alles" (everything) and he told her
that Elisabeth Gruemmer was ill and had to cancel an engagement to sing
Strauss' *Four Last Songs* in London in four days w/ Sir Adrian Boult.
Would Ms.  Lear be able to fill in?  Ms.  Lear, understanding him to
have said "fourteen" days, said that she could, only to discover that
she now had to learn one song a day for the impending recital.  Taken
from the airport in London to the rehearsal hall (Mason Hall?), which
was different from the concert hall, she was ceremonially introduced as
Mme Gruemmer.  Flustered, she tried to explain, "I'm extremely sorry,
Sir Boult....." and was corrected as to the proper form of address, after
which she explained that she was substituting for the sick Elisabeth
Gruemmer.  Rehearsals started and Boult kept muttering words like
"terrible" and "horrible" leaving Ms.  Lear at a loss until it became
clear he was talking about the acoustics of the hall.  "You're magnificent,"
he declared.  She was invited back for ten consecutive years.

At this point she called for the sound person to play a recording of the
second Wesendonck song.  I think that was it rather than the second of
Strauss' Four last, but it doesn't matter.  The sound was as bad as for
her introduction and I'm not sure we even heard it through to the end.
I can't understand how in a music school like the Levine School, they
can't present acceptable sound recordings.

After singing American composers, including Barber and Copland in Hannover,
she was asked if she would sing *Lulu* in Vienna.  Apparently they didn't
think the transition from "modern" Americans like Barber and Copland
to 12-tone music to be that great.  Normally they would have had Ilona
Steingruber sing the role but she was too corpulent to be a convincingly
seductive courtesan.  When she was recommended, the Viennese asked only
"What does she look like?" Not fully convinced by the reassurances they
had received, the Viennese sent a team of evaluators to meet her in
Berlin at Kempinski's.  (When my paternal grandfather wanted to compliment
my mother's cooking, he'd say "Wie bei Kempinski", or "just like at
Kempinski"!) Here Ms.  Lear mimed the several middle aged Viennese as
well as herself "all tarted up" as she described it.  She passed muster
and was given the score w/ three weeks before the performance, which was
well received.

Here they played a video w/ much better sound of a scene from *Lulu* w/
Dr.  Schoen, where she sings "I never pretended to be anything but what
I was".

Her *Lulu* became quite a success and she described a performance at the
Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.  As she described it, her costumes were
much more revealing there and the Argentinean male stage hands, etc.,
much less inhibited at showing their appreciation, as she demonstrated
by gaping facial expressions and gestures.  Argentina, then as now, was
experiencing a cash flow problem and there was a possibility that she
might not get paid.  She announced that if she wasn't paid in full by
the end of the first act, she wouldn't perform the second.  Her fee was
delivered during the intermission, but as it was all in small bills, she
insisted on counting it, causing the intermission to be somewhat extended.
After her performance, the fans greeted her at the stage door as she was
leaving for the airport back to LA w/ scissors to snip off souvenirs
from her dress and even her hair.

Perhaps thinking that if you can sing one wanton you can sing them all,
conductors now wanted her to sing Salome.  "Conductors," Ms.  Lear said,
"don't know a thing about voice," which she corrected to "most conductors"
upon discovering at least one in the audience.  Lulu requires high notes.
Salome, more dramatic heft.  Ms.  Lear then imitated Herbert von Karajan
explaining w/ pursed lips how it would be all right; he'd have the
orchestra play very piano, take the score, learn it and come back tomorrow.
"Endlich habe ich meine Salome gefunden!" (Finally, I've found my Salome.)
Thomas Stewart advised her that, if she succeeded, she would be in demand
everywhere and would ruin her voice.  She turned HvK's offer down and
he never asked her to sing w/ him again.  A bit later Leontyne Price
also turned him down for the same reason, and she never w/ him again
either.

Appearing as Dona Elvira in London, she was pegged as a "dead ringer for
Liz Taylor in Cleopatra" and was engaged to sing the role in Handel's
*Julius Caesar* in Kansas City but I think she said the production was
cancelled.  She turned down Bing's offer to sing in *Vanessa* to sing
Lavinia in *Mourning Becomes Electra*.

We then saw a video of a scene from *The Secret of Susanne* in which
Thomas Stewart, her husband in the opera as in real life, throws a tantrum
believing that Susanna has a lover, while actually the only secret she's
keeping from her husband is that she smokes.  She assured us that her
husband never acted that way at home....Well, maybe once....

She then told us about a movie she did w/ Robert Redford (whom she,
petite herself, described as coming up to her chin) called *Buffalo
Bill and the Indians* w/ a lot of other famous actors, in which she
sings *The Last Rose of Summer*.  We saw a video of that scene and her
subsequent rejection of Redford's tentative amorous advances.  By Ms.
Lear's account, it was an awful movie, but it did win the Golden Bear
award in Germany.

Perhaps the piece de resistance of her talk was what James Levine called
her Bayreuth story.  I don't think my telling it here will spoil it if
you ever hear her tell it.  As well as I might be able to recall how she
told it, I wouldn't be able to reproduce how she acted it out.  It had
to be seen as well as heard.  But this is what it's about.

Thomas Stewart was in Bayreuth singing Amfortas in *Parsifal*.  He appears
in the first act and in the third act.  Ms.  Lear was attending the opera
only to hear her husband.  Bayreuth's seats are instruments of torture
that could have been devised only by Germans.  You cannot lean back;
you have no leg room, and you have to get up to let anybody pass.  She
therefore wanted to postpone her entrance into the theater to the last
minute and therefore asked for an aisle seat.  "Nein!" replied the seat
assigners.  A person as important as the wife of Thomas Steward has to
sit in the center of the row.  She was therefore given seat number 25
in a 50-seat row.  The seats filled up, hers alone remaining vacant.
Who could this person be, important enough to be assigned seat number
25 and not showing up?  Ms.  Lear enters to claim her seat in the last
minute.  It's apparently a strict rule in Germany that you may not turn
your back on people whose seats you pass as you find your own.  So she
passes and faces 24 people, all of whom have to get up as she makes her
way to her own seat, murmuring different deferential "please excuse me"s
each time.  Since her husband doesn't appear in the second act she decided
to sit it out even though it's lighter than the first and second, has
pretty flower maidens, seductions and all that other good stuff.  The
people in her row, remembering her late entrance for the first act, all
remain standing, waiting for her to show up, but she doesn't.  Twenty-four
bangs as the seats go down just as the second act starts.  The good
people in the row have concluded that the occupant of seat 25 has decided
to leave.  Therefore, after the second intermission, they simply take
their seats as they come back into the hall.  Just before the third act
starts, in comes Ms.  Lear again, causing the people in her row to get
up and again be faced by her, each in turn getting another "pardon me",
"please pardon me".

Ms.  Lear also told us how she was scheduled to appear in Florida w/
Pavarotti only to realize that it conflicted w/ a golf championship in
which she was competing early the next morning.  She therefore pleaded
a bad case of the flu, which was a shame because Birgit Nilsson had also
called in sick.  She won the golf tournament the next day, and the local
papers, lamenting on the front page her absence from the Pavarotti
concert, described in a back page the golf tournament won by "Mrs.
Evelyn Stewart", and apparently nobody put two and two together.

She planned her role of the Marschallin in *Der Rosenkavalier* as the
appropriate one for her unannounced farewell performance.  She'd already
sung Sophie and Octavian in that role, and confided that, right now,
she'd probably be able to sing Baron Ochs.  Unfortunately, she broke
off a front tooth on a piece of Italian bread the afternoon before the
performance.  She was rushed to a Fifth Avenue dentist.  Thomas Steward,
suggested that maybe the lost tooth, which Ms.  Lear had been able to
salvage could be pasted back in, a suggestion the dismissal of which by
the dentist who described how the tooth would fly out as soon as she
began to sing Ms.  Lear vividly illustrated.  A replacement tooth had
to be inserted and anchored to the two neighboring teeth.  The lost tooth
had unfortunately been live, so Ms.  Lear had to be treated w/ novocaine.
She showed up for the performance w/ a numbed mouth, looking, as she
reproduced it for us, as if she'd been sucking a lemon.  Fortunately the
novocaine did wear off as the performance progressed so that by the end
she had again reached full form.  There was a moving scene when at the
conclusion, at which she, rather than Octavian, took the last bow, it
was announced that this was her farewell performance.

And with this, her talk had reached its end, but not before she reminded
us of George M.  Cohan's instruction "Always leave them wanting more".

She did find it fitting and proper to disclose that she was now 76 and
had been diagnosed w/ cancer and had had a double mastectomy but was
"still here".  I hope she'll be around for a long time to come.

Answering a few questions from the floor she said that the roles she
regretted not having sung were Violetta and Butterfly.  The Wagner role
w/ which she would most identify would probably be Senta.  She wouldn't
be able to toss her hair the way Kundry does.  She loves her children,
but despite all the coaching from her and her husband, they're not
musical.

Walter Meyer