Her son, Jan Stewart, confirmed the death.

Miss Lear, who sang more than 90 performances with the Metropolitan Opera in the 1960s and afterward, was praised on both sides of the Atlantic for her vocal warmth, expressive musicality and dramatic stage presence. As a recitalist, she was also known for her versatility, singing the work of composers from Mozart to Schoenberg to Sondheim.

She was especially renowned as an interpreter of Alban Berg. In midcentury Europe, Miss Lear was considered one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Berg's Lulu, the doomed, murderous prostitute at the heart of his 1937 opera of that name.

At the Met, Miss Lear sang Marie in "Wozzeck," Berg's atonal opera about infidelity and murder.

Reviewing her Marie there in 1969, Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The New York Times that Miss Lear was "intelligent, capable of producing floods of well-focused tone, dramatically intense." He added, however, that her physical attractiveness worked against her, making Marie's affair with "that lout of a Wozzeck" implausible.

Evelyn Shulman was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 8, 1926. Her maternal grandfather, Savel Kwartin, was a distinguished cantor in Europe and the United States. Her mother, Nina Kwartin Shulman, was an opera and concert singer who largely forsook her career for marriage and motherhood.

Young Evelyn had determined to be a singer by the time she was 3, but was waylaid by piano and French horn studies. After an early marriage to Walter Lear, a doctor, ended in divorce, she decided to pursue vocal training in earnest and enrolled at the Juilliard School. In 1955 she married a classmate, the baritone Thomas Stewart, with whom she would appear often in recital and on recordings.

Like many homegrown singers of their day, Miss Lear and Mr. Stewart labored under the onus of being American. American opera houses of the period displayed a marked bias toward the Old World, with first-rate American singers often passed over in favor of second-rate European ones.

Mr. Stewart was on the point of abandoning music for a job with I.B.M. when both he and Miss Lear were awarded Fulbright fellowships for study in Germany. They moved to Europe, where they made their reputations.

In 1958 Miss Lear drew wide notice for singing Richard Strauss's "Four Last Songs" with the London Philharmonic under Sir Adrian Boult. She had learned the score in just four days.

Her talent for quick study served her well two years later, when the Vienna Festival asked her to take over the part of Lulu — a role she had never sung — on short notice. The opera is composed in the 12-tone or "serial" style, an eminently unhummable technique in which all 12 notes of the Western musical scale are used in rigorously equal proportion.

"Why does this have to be so damn hard?" Miss Lear recalled thinking as she was learning the role. But she mastered it in a matter of weeks, and her performance, under Karl Böhm, brought international renown.

Miss Lear made her Met debut in 1967, under Zubin Mehta, as Lavinia (the counterpart of Electra) in the world premiere of "Mourning Becomes Electra." The opera, by Marvin David Levy, is an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's drama, itself a reworking of the Greek myth of Orestes.

In the late 1960s, suffering from vocal wear, Miss Lear temporarily lost her voice. She retooled her repertory, shifting her focus to Mozart and Italian opera, and her career was renewed. She sang with the Met until her retirement in 1985.

Her other Met roles include Octavian in Richard Strauss's "Rosenkavalier" and the Composer in his "Ariadne auf Naxos"; Cherubino in Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro" and Donna Elvira in his "Don Giovanni"; Alice Ford in Verdi's "Falstaff"; and, in later years, Countess Geschwitz in "Lulu."

Mr. Stewart died in 2006. Miss Lear, who lived in Rockville, Md., is survived by her son, Jan; a daughter, Bonni Stewart; and two grandchildren.

With her husband, she founded the Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart Emerging Singers Program under the aegis of the Wagner Society of Washington D.C.

If Miss Lear was best known for appearing in operas of murder, incest and that sort of thing, then her reputation, she made clear, did not faze her.

"I love to do Handel, Mozart and Strauss, and I love to do my neurotic modern heroines too," she told The New York Times in 1967. "I am never afraid to make an ugly sound on stage because it is real and reality is never ugly."