Music community mourns trailblazing Coast Salish opera singer Rose-Ellen Nichols
Mezzo-soprano helped bring alive groundbreaking works such as Marie Clements’ Missing and Margaret Atwood’s Pauline
Rose-Ellen Nichols paved a path both for Indigenous opera singers and for Indigenous stories in opera.
COAST SALISH MEZZO-SOPRANO Rose-Ellen Nichols passed away Sunday after a long battle with cancer. Her career had taken her from small Pender Harbour to a master’s degree in opera from UBC, and then to stages from Vancouver to the Czech Republic, Ireland, Germany, and beyond.
Known for her rich, patina’d mezzo voice, Nichols was most celebrated here for forging new paths in Indigenous stories in opera. That included her role as Native Mother in the November 2017 world premiere of Pacific Opera Victoria and City Opera Vancouver’s Missing, by Marie Clements and Brian Current; in the work, her character’s daughter has gone missing on British Columbia’s Highway 16, the Highway of Tears, where so many Indigenous women have disappeared. Earlier, in 2014, she sang the lead in Pauline, never leaving the stage in Margaret Atwood and Tobin Stokes’ chamber opera about Pauline Johnson, the mixed-race poet of Mohawk and European descent, produced by City Opera at the York Theatre in 2014; Norman Armour directed the production.
She also helped bring other acclaimed new operas to the stage, singing the part of Antonia Wolf in Lloyd Burritt’s The Dream Healer; Fadila in Arthur Bachmann’s What Brought Us Here; and Rebecca/Red Cedar in Veda Hille’s Jack Pine (performed at Vancouver Opera’s Opera in Schools program).
Thanks to her vocal versatility, Nichols’ career spanned early music to contemporary opera. While at UBC Opera, her roles had included Marcellina in Le Nozze Di Figaro and Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus. Amid her Canadian roles, she played the part of Dido in Dido and Aeneas and Hypolita in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, also performing at Calgary Opera as Polinesso in Handel’s Ariodante, and in Newfoundland as Zita in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi with Opera on the Avalon. In the Czech Republic, she performed both Lapák and Paní Pásková in Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen and Filipievna in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. She returned to appear as Dorabella in Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte at Prague's prestigious Estates Theatre.
City Opera posted this archival photo of Rose-Ellen Nichols working with director Norman Armour on Pauline.
Beyond an impactful career, Nichols is also being remembered as a beautiful human being. Canadian baritone Clarence Frazer posted today, “No matter what, when Rose walked into a rehearsal room the atmosphere suddenly became more joyous, more happy, more light and even more positive. Which in turn made us work even harder, get more done and she always made us remember to have fun.”
No announcements have been made as far as a memorial or scholarship.
Rose-Ellen Nichols in Missing. Photo by Emily Cooper
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