Lawrence, Vera Brodsky

American pianist, editor, and music historian.

Vera Brodsky Lawrence, composer, pianist, music editor and American music historian, now deceased; Edward Mabley, librettist and lyricist, screenwriter and director, now deceased.

Vera Brodsky Lawrence (1909-1996) enjoyed two successful, consecutive careers, as a concert pianist and as a music historian, whose authoritative scholarship helped to renew interest in American ragtime music.

A graduate of Juilliard, she was well known in the 1930s and 1940s for her duo-piano playing with Harold Triggs, and for solo performances on radio stations, playing under the name, Vera Brodsky. Following the death of her husband, Theodore Lawrence, in 1964, she stopped playing the piano professionally and published her first major work, The Piano Music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1969). In 1970 her focus turned to the music of Scott Joplin, and together with the New York Public Library, she published a two-volume set of his collected works. Lawrence's involvement with Joplin's music included a consultant position on the production of the posthumous premiere of his opera, Treemonisha (1972). Two of Lawrence's other books are: Music for Patriots, Politicians, and Presidents (1975), a collection of early American political songs and other Americana; and a three volume work on the nineteenth century New York music scene, drawing on the diaries of George Templeton Strong, titled Strong on Music (1988-1999), which she was still working on at the time of her death.