Lawrence, Vera Brodsky

Vera Brodsky was born on July 1, 1909, in Norfolk, Virginia. She studied piano in New York City under Alexander Lambert, and played concerts in Europe before the age of twenty. Her first radio broadcast was a live recital from Aeolian Hall, in New York on February 6, 1925. Other early performances included recitals with the Roth Quartet, which occurred while she was a student at Juilliard (1929-1932). She was well known in the 1930s and 1940s for her duo-piano playing with Harold Triggs, and for solo performances on radio stations such as WOR. From 1939 to 1946 she worked for CBS as staff pianist. She married Theodore Lawrence, an engineer for the British Broadcasting Corporation, in 1944; he died in an automobile accident in 1964. This event was the turning point in Lawrence’s life and career. According to a newspaper interview, she threw away scrapbooks that documented her early life, and stopped playing the piano professionally.

In the late 1960s, Lawrence devoted her energy to American music history, and “the concept of making historical out-of-print American music available to libraries and scholars….” (letter to Georgia Haugh, Box 7, folder 16) Her first major work was The Piano Music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1969), which is notable because it was the first publication to collect all of an American composer’s works. In 1970 her focus turned to Scott Joplin’s music, and together with the New York Public Library, she published a two-volume set of his collected works (reprinted in 1981 as The Complete Works of Scott Joplin ). These volumes revived the nation’s interest in ragtime music, and established Lawrence as an authority on the subject. Lawrence’s involvement with Joplin included a consultant position for the production of his opera, Treemonisha, which had its world premier in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1972.

Two of Lawrence’s other books are: Music for Patriots, Politicians, and Presidents (1975), a 480 page collection of early American political songs and other Americana; and a three volume set on the lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong, titled Strong on Music (1988-1999). This project offered a “detailed and comprehensive view of musical endeavors in mid-nineteenth-century New York City,” which Lawrence compiled from Strong’s diaries and the minds of his contemporaries. Vera Brodsky Lawrence died on September 18, 1996, leaving the third Strong volume nearly complete.

Sources: “Brodsky and Triggs,” MacMillan Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians, New York: MacMillan Co., 1938

Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2005. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2005. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (accessed on August 25, 2005)

New York Times Obituary, September 22, 1996, p. 46

From the guide to the Vera Brodsky Lawrence papers, 1863-1991, 1970-1984, (The New York Public Library. Music Division.)