Vivian F. Laube

Vivian Frederick Laube                        December 23, 1921 – November 4, 201

Born in 1921, Vivian Frederick grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in a working class neighborhood. An only child, she lived in a row house with her parents and grandparents. She graduated from Cedar Crest College in Allentown in 1943 with a bachelors of science, and earned her masters of science from Cornell University in 1946. She married Herbert D. Laube, a distinguished Cornell law professor, the following September and was a devoted wife and active faculty spouse until his death in 1960. Music was her life-long passion: she had a fine alto voice, perfect pitch, and sang in choirs from her teen years until she was 85. From 1952 to 1968, Vivian Laube managed the classical concert series for the Cornell Music Department. She worked with Marian Anderson, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, the pianists Vladimir Horowitz and Artur Rubinstein, and she became personal friends of conductor Eugene Ormondy, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and most of all, her dear friend Isobel Baillie, the English soprano. These relationships continued when she left Cornell to manage concerts for Ithaca College from 1966 to 1979. She retired to care for her aging mother until her death in 1988. Vivian then moved to Maui, Hawaii, but returned to Ithaca in 1994 when she was 73. Vivian’s most memorable singing experience came in 1995, in a choir that performed Bach’s B minor Mass at Dachau, the notorious Nazi concentration camp in Germany. She sang in the choir of the First Congregational Church for many years. All her life, Vivian Laube was a quiet philanthropist both to charitable causes but especially in personal gifts to people she cared about, helping many people through difficult times in their lives or to achieve a life’s dream. She passed away peacefully, surrounded by love, on November 4, 2019, age 97, after several years of declining ability and a brief illness. She had no children, but is mourned by a host of friends and their children. Funeral services will be at St. Catherine of Sienna Catholic Church on November 19 at 11 am. Memorial gifts should be given to the Music Endowment Fund of the First Congregational Church or the Tompkins County

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