Vera Rózsa

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

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 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.

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, included 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.

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