Marjorie Lawrence 1907-1979

In 1939 Lawrence made a concert tour of Australia under the management of Archy Longden. On 17 June, amid an avalanche of publicity, she gave her first Australian concert in the austere setting of the Globe Theatre at Winchelsea, which her father had built and of which, incidentally, she was a part owner. Her subsequent Melbourne Town Hall concerts were packed, but she failed to draw audiences in Sydney. Longden claimed unfair competition from the ABC, which had recently toured soprano Lotte Lehmann. A campaign by some of Sydney’s most prominent women ensured a full house for her last appearance. It was so successful that Lawrence agreed to an extra concert for the ABC. She sang the closing scenes of Götterdämmerung and Strauss’s Salome with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and ‘the Town Hall rocked on its foundations with the thunders of appreciation.’ Soon after, because of the war, the ABC banned any music for which living German composers would receive royalties, and decreed that its artists should use English translations when they sang German lieder.Lawrence capped off her Sydney visit with a season at the State, one of the city’s great picture palaces. ‘This will let me sing to Australian people who could not afford to hear me at the Town Hall’, she explained. ‘The musical standard will not be lowered, but I shall sing songs that I consider will interest an average Australian audience.’ She started with Elisabeth’s Greeting from Tannhäuser.

On 29 March 1941 at the height of her fame, Lawrence married Dr Thomas King, an American osteopathic physician. Soon after, while she was singing Brünnhilde in Die Walküre in Mexico City, she was suddenly unable to stand. Poliomyelitis was diagnosed. With the same determination with which she had tackled her career, she tackled her disease. The controversial Australian, Sister Elizabeth Kenny, assisted with her treatment.

It was only 18 months before Lawrence re-appeared in public. In 1942, seated in a wheel chair, she sang at a concert in Minneapolis. She returned to the Met, singing Venus in Tannhäuser from a divan. She appeared at the Met for the last time in 1944 – though she did take the stage as an ‘honoured guest’ for the gala that closed the old Met in October 1966.