Meyer Lutz

Johann Baptist Wilhelm Meyer Lutz (Münnerstadt, 1828 – Kensington, London, 1903) was a German-born composer, conductor and organist who spent much of his career in England. His career is of interest because he moved between three very different spheres of Victorian musical life: the church, the theatre and the seaside spa resorts. In London's musical theatre in particular, he left a concrete mark.

He was born in Münnerstadt, the second of eight children of Georg Joseph Lutz, a music teacher and schoolmaster, and his wife Magdalena. His elder brother, Johann von Lutz, would become Prime Minister of Bavaria. Lutz was playing the piano in public with an orchestra at the age of twelve and, after the family moved to Würzburg, he studied at the gymnasium and then at the university, where he took lessons from Franz Xaver Eisenhofer and Max Keller, although his training was geared towards medicine. In 1846 he travelled to Birmingham with a German orchestra and, taking advantage of the opening that followed Catholic emancipation, became assistant organist at the Catholic cathedral of St Chad. Shortly afterwards he moved to St George's Cathedral in Southwark, London, as principal organist and choirmaster, a post he held from 1848 to 1874. There he conducted numerous orchestral masses, some of them his own, with professional musicians. He was also organist of the Grand Lodge of Freemasons from 1890.

His activity was divided between the stage and the coast. At London's Surrey Theatre he directed an annual season between 1851 and 1855 and, in the 1860s, he was musical director of several English opera companies. His greatest prominence, however, came with the Gaiety Theatre, where he was appointed musical director in February 1869 and remained for seventeen years as the right-hand man of the impresario John Hollingshead. Under his successor, George Edwardes, he began staging original scores instead of pastiches. Each summer and autumn season he worked in Scarborough and, during the last ten years of his life, he moved to the New Spa at Bridlington.

His Gaiety works, such as Faust Up-to-Date and Carmen Up-to-Data, were burlesque parodies of opera and the literature of the day, and in them Bizet's opera coexisted with popular songs in the minstrel style. The 'Pas de quatre' from Faust Up-to-Date became the house signature tune and helped establish a rhythmic lightness that can still be heard in 'Wouldn't it be loverly?' from My Fair Lady (1956). His legacy is therefore bound up with the formation of British musical theatre rather than with the great symphonic or sacred tradition of his time.