Cox, Jean
Cox, Jean
Cox, Jean , American tenor; b. Gadsen, Ala., Jan. 16, 1922. After attending the Univ. of Ala. and the New England Cons, of Music in Boston, he studied with Kitsamer in Frankfurt am Main, Ricci and Bertelli in Rome, and Lorenz in Munich. In 1951 he made his operatic debut as Lensky with the New England Opera Theater in Boston. In 1954 he made his European operatic debut as Rodolfo in Spoleto, and then sang in Kiel (1954–55) and Braunschweig (1955–59). He appeared at the Bayreuth Festivals (1956–75), at the Hamburg State Opera (1958–73), and at the Mannheim National Theater (from 1959). As a guest artist, he sang with various European opera houses, including the Paris Opera (as Siegmund, 1971) and at London’s Covent Garden (as Siegfried, 1975). In the U.S. he appeared at the Chicago Lyric Opera (1964,1970,1973) and made his Metropolitan Opera debut in N.Y. as Walther von Stolzing on April 2, 1976, where he sang for the season before concentrating his career in Europe. He sang various Wagnerian roles, as well as Fra Diavolo, Don Carlos, Othello, Strauss’s Herod and Bacchus, and the Cardinal in Mathis der Maler
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire