He composes anywhere and everywhere, in the streets, on tops of 'buses,
and even in church.
"I remember," says the popular Gaiety composer, "driving one
Sunday evening to St. George's Cathedral, when the melody to an 'O
Salutaris' struck me. I pencilled it down during the sermon, and my
brother-in-law, Furneaux Cook, sang it after the sermon at Benediction
the same evening."
Herr Lutz believes in taking up some verses and carefully studying them.
"This I often do," he says, "and soon seem to hear a fitting melody
without trying it on the piano till finished."
Fugues and canons, in his opinion, want studying and mathematically
experimentalizing. "Composers," he says in conclusion, "are musical
poets, and 'Poëta nascitur, non fit.'"
The music in his autograph will, I imagine, be familiar to not a few of
my readers.