Vera Rózsa

Vera Rózsa studied at Franz Liszt Academy of Music. Training under Imre Molnár is recorded. Kiri Te Kanawa, Ileana Cotrubaș and Ildikó Komlósi are recorded as having studied under Vera Rózsa. The recorded working language is Hungarian. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are opera. Distinctions recorded are Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

She started her music education at the age of five. Her parents were teachers and having no baby-sitter at home, they simply took her along to school. Her parents, especially her father, were very musical (he played the violin). Vera Rózsa started to learn music also at an early age, her first instructor being her own father. She started to learn how to play the piano somewhat later. After graduating from secondary school at the age of fifteen (much earlier than normal), Vera Rózsa began her musical studies at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. She studied conducting first, but later she switched to vocal studies. The composer and conductor Zoltán Kodály was one of her instructors.

Among 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. As she belonged to the Jewish minority of her homeland, she witnessed the tragedy of losing many talented colleagues and other prominent cultural figures in the Holocaust, including her first husband, the composer and conductor László Weiner, who was deported by the Nazis to a forced labour camp in Slovakia and murdered there. She tried to save his life with the help of Zoltán Kodály, who had also taught Weiner and was one of the witnesses at their wedding, but to no avail. She went into hiding herself, living with a false identity as a Christian. Her talent as an actress allowed her to walk unharmed out of two Gestapo interrogations. She also worked at the Swedish delegation in Budapest with Raoul Wallenberg who tried to save the lives of as many Jews as possible. After the Second World War 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. 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. They 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. As her career developed, she was invited to give master classes all over the world, including in Israel, France, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Finland, the US, Venezuela, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. She was also a judge in many international singing competitions, including Cardiff, the Queen Elizabeth in Brussels, Athens, and a competition established in her honour in Jerusalem. As a teacher, she stressed artistry and interpretation rather than vocal pyrotechnics. She was noted for refusing to impose her own style or technique on her students, but insisted on helping them to develop their own musical style, to the extent that judges at singing competitions would comment that if they couldn't pin down the identity of the teacher from a singer's style, then it was probably Vera Rózsa.