THOMAS STEWART San Saba, TX, August 29, 1928 — Rockville, MD, September 24, 2006 In an international career of some forty years, Thomas Stewart endured as an artist of strength and substance. An imaginative and commanding interpreter of a wide range of baritone and bass-baritone repertory, Stewart was especially celebrated for his expressive, lyrical Wotan, a characterization much admired at Bayreuth, San Francisco Opera, the Metropolitan Opera and the Salzburg Easter Festival, as well as in Vienna, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Hamburg and Paris. Stewart moved to New York from his native Texas to study at Juilliard, where he made his debut as La Roche in Strauss’s Capriccio and met his future wife, American soprano Evelyn Lear. Stewart and Lear were married in 1955 and were frequent partners in opera, recital, recordings and master classes. The soprano, who survives him, was with her husband when he died of a heart attack while playing golf. Stewart’s early professional appearances included his 1954 debuts at New York City Opera, as the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, and at Lyric Opera of Chicago, as Baptista in Giannini’s The Taming of the Shrew, but it was in Germany that he established his reputation. A few years after their marriage, Lear and Stewart won Fulbright Scholarships for study in Europe, and there Stewart’s career began in earnest, with his 1957 engagement by Deutsche Oper Berlin. Within a few seasons, Stewart had arrived at Covent Garden, where he was a regular guest throughout the 1960s and ’70s, and at Bayreuth, where he was to sing for thirteen seasons. Stewart was soon one of Europe’s most in-demand baritones, and he returned to New York as a star. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut during the company’s last season in its home at Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway, as Ford in a revival of Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Falstaff. It was to be the first of Stewart’s 192 appearances with the Met, each marked by the artist’s singular combination of warmth, dignity and intelligence. He was a noble Hans Sachs, an incisive Iago and an uncommonly vivid Balstrode in Peter Grimes. He was Wotan in the 1967 Walküre that marked the Met debut of Herbert von Karajan, as well as in the Met’s 1968 Karajan Rheingold. Stewart was also a principal in new Met productions of Parsifal (Amfortas, 1970), Tristan und Isolde (Kurwenal, 1971), Pelléas et Mélisande (Golaud, 1972), Siegfried (Wanderer, 1972), Götterdämmerung (Gunther, 1974) and Ariadne auf Naxos (Music Master, 1993). In the winter of 1973, Stewart and Lear were Aeneas and Dido in the Met premiere of Purcell’s opera, presented at the Vivian Beaumont Theater as part of the company’s short-lived “Mini-Met.” The following season, the baritone sang the four villains in all nineteen performances of a new Met Les Contes d’Hoffmann. His last Met performance was as the Speaker in Die Zauberflöte, in 1993. Other important North American associations for Stewart were Santa Fe Opera, where he sang Falstaff and Filotero in the U.S. premiere of Cavalli's L'Orione, and San Francisco Opera, where he sang King Lear in the U.S. premiere of Reimann’s Lear (1981). In 1985, Stewart was awarded the San Francisco Opera medal for twenty-five years of distinguished performance with that company. After retiring his opera repertoire, Stewart remained active as a narrator of orchestral works, including Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw and Gurrelieder. Stewart’s commitment to the education and training of young artists was informed by compassion and kindness, as witness the enlightening master classes that he gave with Lear at Juilliard, New England Conservatory, Music Academy of the West and a host of professional companies in North America and Europe. In 1999, the couple established the Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart Emerging Singers Program (in partnership with the Wagner Society of Washington, D.C.), dedicated to identifying singers with the potential for a career singing Wagner — a mission with which he remained passionately involved for the rest of his life. Stewart was always honest about his own early career struggles; it was typical of this generous artist that he devoted so much of his later life to creating opportunities for others. He was an authentic gentleman. F. PAUL DRISCOLL Courtesy of Opera News