Vera Rózsa

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.

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.

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.

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.

Among Rózsa's students were Sarah Walker, Cynthia Hoffmann, Kiri Te Kanawa, Ileana Cotrubaș,[2] Sonia Theodoridou, Agathe Martel, Karita Mattila, Dorothea Röschmann, Tom Krause, Jyrki Niskanen, Mossa Bildner, Martina Bovet, Clarry Bartha, Anne Sofie von Otter, Anne Howells, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Lillian Watson, François le Roux, Nora Gubisch, Marie Te Hapuku, Ildikó Komlósi, Louise Werner, and many others.

[3] Participation in her classes and courses is mentioned in many modern day classical music singers' CVs.