Vera Brodsky Lawrence

Vera Brodsky Lawrence was the only child of parents who, in 1905, emigrated from Russia to the U.S. In New York City she studied under Alexander Lambert, and played concerts in Europe before the age of twenty. On February 6, 1925 Lambert presented a concert at Aeolian Hall that was broadcast on station WJZ. Two of his students, students, Vera Brodsky and Hanna Lefkowitz, appeared on the recital, playing solos as well as music for two pianos. While attending Juilliard (1929-1932) Brodsky played recitals with the Roth Quartet. In the 1920s Vera studied piano with Josef Lhévinne. A fellow pupil named Harold Triggs became Brodsky's frequent piano partner and they toured extensively for many years. To augment their concert income they appeared on radio and even early television. Several composers wrote music especially for them, including Dana Suesse, Leopold Godowsky, Alec Wilder, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. From 1939-1946 Vera was a staff pianist for CBS radio where her unrivaled musical skill was put to good use. She married Theodore Lawrence, an engineer for the British Broadcasting Corporation, in 1944; he died in an automobile accident in 1964. After losing her husband she turned to musical research, teaching, editing and writing. Her articles on two-piano music for the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Music and Albert Wier's "The Piano" are considered definitive on the subject. Vera saw that the history of American music was a neglected field, and devoted her energy to American music history, and "the concept of making historical out-of-print American music available to libraries and scholars...." With a Ford Foundation grant, her first major undertaking was The Piano Music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1969), 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, along with new recordings and the film "The Sting," helped revive the nation's interest in ragtime music. In a 1972 interview Vera related to Bernard Jacobsen: "I heard my friend Bill Bolcom play some of Joplin's rags five years ago. I was tremendously excited by the music." A Rockefeller Foundation grant helped to make it possible. Lawrence's involvement with Joplin included, importantly, a consultant position for the production of his opera, Treemonisha, which had its world premiere in Atlanta, Georgia in 1972. Although Vera was very pleased with the public praise of her Gottschalk and Joplin publications, she was proud of "Music For Patriots, Politicians and Presidents" (1975). Her greatest professional triumph was in editing and annotating "Strong On Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong" (Oxford University Press, 1988), a two-volume document based on the voluminous, detailed, hand-written diaries of the devoted 19th century concert-goer George Templeton Strong.