As a schoolboy at Barry Boys' Grammar School he sang in a local church choir and at the age of seven he took part in the nascent Welsh National Opera's first production, Cavalleria Rusticana in Cardiff in April 1946.
His biographer Raymond Holden counts as his chief university influences the critic and teacher F. R. Leavis, the writer E. M. Forster and the conductor David Willcocks.
[1] Tear then played Peter Quint in a production of The Turn of the Screw, before joining Britten and the EOG in a four-week tour of the Soviet Union in September and October 1964.
[4] His voice was described by his obituarist in The Times as "typically British: less expansive than the Italian style and with little of the German heroic tenor in it, but pure, elegant, flexible, capable of sweetness and with a expressive quality at the service of fine musicianship and great intelligence.
A greater part of his operatic repertoire consisted of character roles, in which, in the view of The Times, "his humour and his sharp human perceptions were given free rein".
[3] They included Monostatos in The Magic Flute, Don Basilio in Le nozze di Figaro, Jaquino in Fidelio, Spalanzani in The Tales of Hoffmann, Valzacchi in Der Rosenkavalier, and Aegisth in Elektra.
In a memorial tribute Robert Ponsonby commented that they were both written "in a style so odd, so metaphysical and so idiosyncratic as sometimes to defy comprehension", although Tear's "seriousness and his interest in things spiritual (he had discovered Buddhism) were self-evident – as they were in his paintings and drawings).
[11] Roles he sang on disc range from Uriel in Haydn's The Creation to the painter in Berg's Lulu, and from Pitichinaccio in Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann to Sir Harvey in Donizetti's Anna Bolena.
His many classical recordings include performances of Bach, Handel, Monteverdi, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Janáček, Wagner and Messiaen.