Sir Geraint Evans; Opera Star Epitomized ‘Falstaff’

Sir Geraint Evans, the Welsh-born baritone who for three decades set the standard for the Falstaffs of the operatic world, died Sunday.

A spokesman for his family said the coal miner’s son died in a hospital in Aberystwyth in northern Wales after suffering a heart attack at his nearby home a week earlier. Evans was 70.

His wife, Brenda, and their two sons were at his bedside.

Since 1957, when he first portrayed Giuseppe Verdi’s fat knight at England’s Glyndebourne music festival, Sir Geraint, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1969, was considered the world’s foremost Falstaff.

Martin Bernheimer, The Times’ music critic, writing of a 1970 performance in San Francisco, said, “Geraint’s Sir John is the one who reminds us that Verdi’s knight is . . . not a cavalier in the first flush of youth and prosperity, perhaps, but still a man of wit and more than a vestige of dignity.

“Evans is a thinking man’s baritone,” he continued, “an artist who finds motivation for every inflection and for every movement in the text and score.”

Jeremy Isaacs, the general director of the Royal Opera House, said Sunday that Evans was one of the greatest artists to sing at Covent Garden.

“He was perhaps the first great British singer of the postwar years to achieve success on the international stage,” Isaacs said.

Born in the tiny pit-mining village of Cilfynydd, near Pontypridd, in southern Wales, Evans was raised by his grandparents after his mother died when he was an infant.

He began studying voice when he was 17 after singing with the local Welsh Methodist chapel choir as a boy. He had won his first singing honors as a soprano when he was 4.

Sir Geraint was working at common jobs when he joined the Royal Air Force during World War II.

After his discharge he resumed his vocal studies in Hamburg, then in Geneva and finally in London with Walter Hyde.

He joined the British Forces Network chorus and then made his operatic debut at London’s Covent Garden in 1948 as the night watchman in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger.”

He was a fixture at Covent Garden for the next 35 years, singing a variety of roles--most prominently in “Pagliacci,” as Schaunard in “La Boheme,” as Leporello in “Don Giovanni,” as “Wozzeck,” as Figaro in “The Marriage of Figaro,” as “Don Pasquale” and as “Falstaff.”

His work took him around the world with performances at the Vienna State Opera, La Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the San Francisco Opera in that city and in Los Angeles, the Paris Opera and the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.

Evans, who believed acting was as important as singing in opera, practiced ballet to achieve a lightness of foot.

His autobiography, “Geraint Evans: A Knight at the Opera,” was published in 1984.

On June 4, 1984, he made his last Covent Garden appearance, singing Belcore in “L’Elisir D’Amore.” Prince Charles attended the emotional performance, afterward joining the audience and Covent Garden chorus in a stirring rendition of the Welsh national anthem.

Evans cried as he gathered up the bouquets that covered the stage.