Jon Fredric West was born in Dayton, Ohio, and studied at the Manhattan School of Music and at the Juilliard Opera Theatre. He sang rôles such as Tannhäuser, Siegfried in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, Tristan, the Emperor in Die Frau ohne Schatten and Otello at the Munich Prinzregenten Theater, the Bavarian State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Vienna State Opera, the Rome Teatro dell’Opera, the Madrid Teatro Real, Covent Garden and the Chicago Lyric Opera, as well as at the New York Met, and appeared at the Salzburg Festival and the Festival de Musica de Canarias. In Zurich he sang the male title-rôle in Samson et Dalila, in Tel Aviv and San Francisco Canio in Pagliacci, and Florestan at La Fenice. He has worked with conductors including Claudio Abbado, Sir Colin Davis, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Simon Rattle and Seiji Ozawa. He has also been heard in Stuttgart as Canio and as Tristan.