Last night the programme for the Royal Opera's current production of Fidelio included a special tribute to that most characterful of tenors, Robert Tear, who died this week at the age of 72. Only once did I have the immense pleasure of spending time in the company of this warm and witty man in a Radio 3 book-review programme, which was funny and easy thanks to his interesting, and interested, conversation. He was, though, a constant presence in my life through his wonderfully interactive response to the performance around him when sitting on a concert platform and the number of precisely observed roles, later cameos, he took on at Covent Garden, English National Opera and Glyndebourne. Few knew him better than his equally distinguished colleague Sir Thomas Allen, whose reminiscence as printed last night the Royal Opera gives us kind permission to reproduce here.
We singers meet many people in our Romany life. They come in so many shapes and sizes and types, and probably just as many as there are characters in the operas you attend.
But not many of them are like Bob - you may know him better as Robert Tear.
He was, I'm happy to say, my friend and I saw the world with him, or perhaps more correctly that part of the world where music of the highest level was being performed.
I knew him first through Bach cantatas, then the Chandos Anthems of Handel under David Willcocks alongside Britten's St Cecilia. But for many years we "trod the boards" together in London, in Figaro and Billy Budd and Janáček's Vixen; at the Salzburg Festival in Monteverdi, and lately at Glyndebourne, where as Dr Blind in Die Fledermaus he was seldom more happy than when revealing the parts of his ladies underwear to me as his little "Freudian slip".
As you can see [the programme included photographs of Tear as Wagner's Loge, Britten's Captain Vere, Richard Strauss's Herod, the Producer in Berio's Un re in ascolto and the Emperor Altoum in Turandot] the span of his work was vast and I've never encountered anyone with his degree of comfort that encompassed the earliest of musical styles with the "bang up to date".
He was fun, intelligent, bright and fully rounded. For me that was his greatest appeal. Music, thankfully, was only a part of what made him the dear engaging friend I knew and loved.Whoever he was when he entered a room, you could be sure it was always interesting and often very challenging. That was the Celt in him, I think.
There are too few of his kind now and we shall miss him greatly. I shall miss him greatly.
Thomas Allen
Watch Robert Tear as Gustav von Aschenbach in the opening scene of Britten's Death in Venice
- See what's on at the Royal Opera. Read Royal Opera reviews
- A further tribute, with photographs and YouTube clips, on David Nice's blog
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