Vera Rózsa

Ms. Rózsa married the Briton Ralph Nordell, whom she had originally met in Budapest when he was serving there with British military intelligence at the end of World War II, in Rome and they moved to Britain in 1954, and she gave birth to a son, David, on 2 August of that year. Vera and Ralph had almost forty years of marriage together, until his death in 1991. In the UK, she began teaching privately in addition to continuing to perform in song recitals for several years. Following an acclaimed performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire at the Leeds Festival, she was invited to teach at the Royal Manchester College of Music, which she did for about ten years. Later she was asked to teach at the London Opera Centre, the Opera Studio in Paris, and subsequently at the Guildhall School of Music in London, although she always taught mainly at her home in London.

After the Second World War Vera Rózsa was a soloist of the Budapest Opera (1945–1946) and later of the Vienna State Opera (1946–1951), where her singing career was disrupted by the partial loss of the use of one lung, the result of pneumonia sustained while she was in hiding from the Nazis. She visited a specialist in Brussels, who told her that she would never be able to sing more than nine or ten minutes at a time. As a result, she developed expertise in breathing technique that not only enabled her to continue singing, although not in demanding opera roles, but to make singing easier for many future students.

Among Vera Rózsa’s first roles as a singer were the part of a Jewish lady in Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus and Cherubino in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, which she performed with OMIKE, the Budapest Jewish community’s professional music and theatre group, in 1943. With a voice that covered both mezzo-soprano and alto, she adopted different singing styles and genres with a wide repertoire that ranged from the standard works of German and Italian opera, through Baroque cantatas and lieder to 20th century works and Yiddish folk songs.

Vera Rózsa OBE (or Vera Rózsa-Nordell, Hungarian: [ˈvɛrɒ ˈroːʒɒ]; 16 May 1917 – 15 October 2010) was a Hungarian singer, voice teacher, and vocal consultant. She lived in the United Kingdom from 1954.