One of the most gilded careers in our post-war musical life ends next week when Robert Tear sings in public for the last time. At least he thinks it will be the last time. ‘There’s nothing in the diary,’ he says. ‘But I’m not disappointed. After 50 years it is wonderful to be relieved of fear. It has made me believe that life could have been like this for ever!’
Tear is singing the Blind Judge in a concert performance of Erich Korngold’s little-known 1927 opera, Das Wunder der Heliane, at the Royal Festival Hall, and he is clearly enjoying the discovery. ‘Korngold came at the end of a generation, the fruit of Wagner that was already wine. His music has a fluency, flexibility and intelligent understanding of every sound in the orchestra, of colour, sense and structure.’ All qualities he put to good use when he left Vienna for Hollywood, where he and Max Steiner transformed the writing of music for films.
Tear has not sung Korngold before, but then not many have. He has done an awful lot, though. It was indeed half a century ago that the 18-year-old son of a railwayman from Barry, south Wales, won a choral scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied English with F.R. Leavis (‘There weren’t many opportunities for argument’) and befriended E.M. Forster
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