Jordan: : I’ll be interviewing two world-renowned opera singers, Thomas Stewart and Evelyn Lear.
Jordan: When did you first become interested in music?
Tom: Actually when I was in grade school. I started playing in the local band of my grade school and then started singing in church and singing with a small choral group. One thing led to another. I just kept singing more and more and more all through the years. But it started fairly early. I always liked to sing as a child. My mother, I don’t remember too much, but in church I would sing all the time.

Jordan: What about you, Eve? When did you become interested in music?
Evelyn: : In my mother’s womb. (Laughter) My mother was an opera singer and her father was a famous singer and I guess the genes just passed on to me. I knew already at the age of three, that I wanted to be an opera singer. I remember walking in front of a mirror in my room. I must have been about eight years old. “You, Evelyn, are going to be a great singer someday.” I don’t know. That’s how it started.

Jordan: Since both of you are opera singers, was it hard to be opera singers at the same time?
Tom: The two of us together you mean?
Jordan: Say if you had a show and she had a show -- was it hard being separated?
Tom: Oh yes. That was a problem all the time because very often that would arise when we would have singing engagements in different cities for different lengths of time.
Evelyn: We figured ten weeks was the maximum we could be separated.
Tom: We spent a lot of time on the telephone, of course, but that happened very much.
Evelyn: Sometimes one of us had to forego an engagement in order to be with the other and it was not always very pleasant but nothing is when you are growing up or when you are planning a career, so we made the best of it.

Jordan: Eve, this question is for you. How many languages do you think you have performed in?
Evelyn: I think six. Korean, if you can believe that. I don’t speak Korean but I sang it. Czech, Russian, Italian, German, French, a little bit English (laughter).
Jordan: What was your favorite language to perform in?
Evelyn: : Italian, French, and German.

Jordan: Tom? Was there a part in your life that you wanted to give up and you just wanted to stop singing?
Tom: That I wanted to give up?
Jordan: : Yes, that you wanted to give up.
Tom: Well, there was a time when I wasn’t being very successful in the beginning. I was thinking about doing something else because I couldn’t get all the work that I needed to raise a family and support a family. Yes, there was a time when I did think about stopping the effort to become an opera singer. But that passed over when we decided to leave America and go to Europe and live in Europe. That then became successful for me and for both of us. But there was a time when I did think about it. Oh, yes.
Evelyn: America did not totally accept American singers, certainly fifty years ago, and we had to go to Europe to make a name for ourselves. It was very discouraging. But, Tom, for instance, was so talented. He could do just about anything other than sing, too. He was an engineer; he was in on the original IBM computer team.
Tom: : I almost went to work for IBM when it got hard because I was a mathematician. In the very beginning I thought I was going to be an engineer and a mathematician.

Jordan: Eve. What was your favorite show? What was your favorite performance that you did?
Evelyn: My favorite performance? Oh, that’s very hard to say. A role that I have become very much identified with is the role of the Grand Princess Marschallin in the opera Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss. That opera is very, very dear to me because there are three leading lady roles in it and I sang all three.
Tom: : Not at the same time, though. (laugher)
Evelyn: : Well, sometimes I did. (laughter) So I love the opera very much.

Jordan: Tom, what was your favorite opera house to perform at?
Tom: The favorite opera house? Oh, my. That’s hard to say because there are some opera houses that were good acoustically to sing in and there were other opera houses that were great because the audience was great. It’s very hard to say. Acoustically, the opera house in Buenos Aires -– the Teatro Cologne in Buenos Aires, Argentina, acoustically was the greatest. But then for the audiences concerned, their enthusiasm, the opera audience in Vienna is fantastic and, of course, the Metropolitan Opera in New York was great as far as people were concerned.
Evelyn: : And Chicago and San Francisco.
Tom: : Chicago. There were so many of them. When you had a success, it was pleasurable.

Jordan: Tom -- You performed many Wagner pieces.
Tom: : That’s right.
Jordan: : What was your favorite piece and why?
Tom: My favorite Wagner opera was an opera called Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The character in it was Hans Sachs and it was my favorite because, I guess a lot of people say, including my wife, and a lot of other people said that the character was very much like me. It was a natural. I just basically played myself when I played the part of Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger.
Evelyn: He played the role of a poet who was also a shoemaker and after singing in that opera where the role of Hans Sachs, which he played, has to be repairing a pair of shoes for another character in the opera. I think Tom Stewart is the only opera singer that I know, certainly in my time, who could repair shoes, if he had to.
Tom: I have to admit. There is a scene where I’m repairing a shoe. I’m nailing the sole on a pair of shoes. And I actually did in the performance.
Evelyn: : He had the nails in his mouth. Made me very nervous. (laugher)

Jordan: Eve -- You earned a Grammy in 1966 for best opera recording. What was that like? Did it change your life at all?
Evelyn: Not one iota. There are other things that change my life much more than that. Winning an award means nothing in the classical or in the operatic field. It’s not like pop music where if you have a hit record, you get a Grammy. You get a Grammy and you get recognition that this was a great role. I just wanted to add that, for me, the most wonderful audience was first in Teatro Cologne in Buenos Aires. The second was Metropolitan Opera and the worst was the Paris Opera in France. Most unfriendly, mean people.

Jordan: I know you lived in many places all over the world?
Evelyn: Yes, we had golf clubs in every airport in the world. I think we had about ten golf clubs all over. And we had money in the banks that you couldn’t take out of the Iron Curtain countries, and whatever property we left all over the world.
Jordan: What is your favorite place to live?
Evelyn: Our favorite place to live is right here.
Tom: Right here in America. Oh sure.
Evelyn: We had beautiful places like Germany and Switzerland and Italy. Even though our country did not recognize our talent, fifty years ago, it was still our country.
Tom: This is home.

Jordan: Do you think, vocally, that it’s 50 percent God-given or do you think you’re born with it or do you think you earn it?
Evelyn: I think you have a very good point there.
Tom: Very good. Yeah.
Evelyn: It’s 50 percent God-given, 50 percent work; and success brings more good things. It’s your mental attitude towards your profession, towards yourself, and towards your colleagues which promotes you and makes you a wonderful singer.
Tom: You’re given the talent to begin with. You have to have that to begin with but what you then have to add it on to really make a success of it – you have to add to that, polishing that talent, learning how to use it to its most effective fashion, and really perfecting it in a sense, the performing aspect of it, but the voice is given to you basically.

Evelyn: Oh, I forgot -– I have one more language I didn’t mention – Hungarian.
Jordan: Hungarian?

Jordan: What advice can you give to an aspiring musician?
Evelyn: A musician or a singer?
Jordan: Either one.
Evelyn: To a singer or musician: First, know your capabilities. Study to the best of your ability to hone your craft. And be prepared for disappointment, failure, and especially rejection.

Tom: Very good. And I can simply add to that -– Always remember that one should always remember the fact that you have the gift -– you have a gift first of all the desire to make music, whether it’s on an instrument or whether it’s singing, or even composing - or whatever it is. Remember that it’s a precious thing. Don’t throw it away. Nurture it. Help it along because it really will make your life complete if you do. If you do not use it and take advantage of it, you’ll be frustrated.
Evelyn: And don’t try to have a career if you don’t have the fire in your belly.
Tom: : Yes. You don’t have to have a career to be a musician but if you want to be a professional musician you have to realize that it has to be the case that I have to do this or I’m nothing.

Jordan: This question is for both of you. First, Tom, did you have a favorite opera singer that you liked to perform with besides your wife? . . that you felt chemistry?
Tom: Yes. There was a lady that I performed with an awful lot –- very famous soprano, dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson, who just passed away this past year. We did many, many Wagner operas because most of my repertoire was singing operas of Richard Wagner. I sang many performances with her. She was a dear colleague, always a joy to work with. And even Evelyn -– they got along very well together.
Evelyn: : I adored her. She had a sense of humor that was hysterical. She was so funny. No wonder you wanted to sing with her. I remember a performance once when he was on stage with her and he was wearing sandals because he was playing a Greek youth. She starts to sing and then she falls down at his feet and then he starts to sing. And she started tickling his toes as he was singing.
Tom: : She was a jokester. She always was having a good time. A very serious and very wonderful singer but she also had a wonderful sense of humor.
Evelyn: : And she had the greatest Wagnerian voice of our time. And who did I like to sing with? After Tom Stewart, . .
Tom: No, I’m not in it.

Evelyn: I enjoyed singing with you because after singing a beautiful phrase or a great high note, he would look at me with his back to the audience and he would always wink at me . .
Tom: I’d wink at her and give her the high sign that she was doing good.
Evelyn: I had a tenor -– the greatest tenor, I think, of our time, who unfortunately died at 32 years old, because he fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. His name was Fritz Wunderlich and he is on my main recordings of The Magic Flute, Wozzeck, Lulu, Eugene Onegin. We had so much in common because he was also a French Horn player and I was a French Horn player. So we discussed many things about our instrument and how it related to the voice and the breath support. He also had a great sense of humor. I hated performing with people who were so serious, they could never crack a joke or laugh at anything I said or anything that happened that was amusing on stage. And sometimes amusing things happened that weren’t planned but that made them funnier.

Jordan: Would you guys do anything different to get to where you are today?
Tom: Do anything different? No, I can’t say that I would have done anything any different. We were very lucky. We worked very hard.
Evelyn: First we worked hard, then we were lucky.
Tom: Yeah. Which came first? It’s hard to say which would come first. But there wasn’t anything that we didn’t do that would have changed things or made things better. I don’t know.

Evelyn: : Many young singers asked us how was it possible to maintain a great career, both of us, both being equally famous, and maintaining our marriage. That is not easy for two people in the same profession. There is jealousy.
Tom: There are egos. A performer has a strong ego. In order to be a performer, you have to have an ego.
Evelyn: If you have any kind of feud, emotion, anger, anything -- you must talk it out and not go to sleep before that’s resolved. That’s the way to do it.
Tom: That’s the only way to clear the air.
Evelyn: And the best thing is to have a Texas rogue marry a Brooklyn girl, and that’s it.
Jordan: : All right, Well, I’d like to thank both of you for letting me interview you today.
Tom: Thank you. They were wonderful questions. Excellent. Fabulous.