Evelyn Lear - Telegraph Evelyn Lear's voice, though not large, was warm, affecting and well-produced, and the fact that she was also a good actress helped to convince sceptics that there was more to contemporary opera than jarring atonality. She was born Evelyn Shulman in Brooklyn on January 8 1926. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a professional singer; her maternal grandfather was a Jewish cantor. As a young girl she learned the piano and French horn. After graduating in Music from Hunter College, New York University, she married Walter Lear, a doctor, and moved to Arlington in Washington State. The marriage broke down in the early 1950s and she returned to New York, where she enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music, studying voice, piano, French horn and composition. She met Thomas Stewart, a fellow student, while working on a duet from Porgy and Bess. In 1955 she created the role of Nina in Marc Blitzstein's Reuben, Reuben, and the same year Stewart became her second husband. In 1956 they travelled to Europe to study on Fulbright scholarships at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. They soon became members of the city's Städtische Oper, where Evelyn made her professional debut in 1959 as the Composer in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos . After her triumph as Lulu, Evelyn Lear became something of a specialist in what she called "neurotic modern heroines." Her debut role at the Metropolitan Opera in 1967 was as Lavinia Mannon in the world premiere of Marvin David Levy's Mourning Becomes Electra. She went on to sing a leading role in Schoenberg's Erwartung and was Marie in Berg's Wozzeck, winning a Grammy Award in 1966 for her recording with Karl Böhm, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Fritz Wunderlich. She also built a reputation as an interpreter of Strauss, making her London debut in 1958 in a concert performance of the Four Last Songs with the London Philharmonic under Sir Adrian Boult, and singing all three main female roles in Rosenkavalier. In the late 1960s Evelyn Lear suffered a vocal crisis , and for a while she returned to more traditional - though far from easy - roles such as Cherubino, Donna Elvira (in which she had made her Covent Garden debut in 1965), and the title characters in Puccini's Tosca (opposite her husband's Scarpia) and Manon Lescaut. But she returned to the modern repertoire in the 1970s, creating the roles of Irma Arkadina in Thomas Pasatieri's The Seagull at the Houston Grand Opera in 1974; of Magna in Robert Ward's Minutes to Midnight in 1982; and of Ranyevskaya in Rudolf Kelterborn's Kirschgarten in Zurich in 1984. After her farewell performance at the Met, Evelyn Lear retired from the stage. Afterwards she taught at the University of Maryland and gave master classes around the world. In 2006 Thomas Stewart died of a heart attack. Evelyn Lear is survived by a son and daughter of her first marriage. Evelyn Lear, born January 8 1926, died July 1 2012