Robert Kreutz

Robert Kreutz
March 21, 1922 - April 7, 1996

Robert Edward Kreutz was born on March 21, 1922, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He graduated from Aquinas High School in 1940. He studied composition at the American Conservatory in Chicago and at the University of California, Los Angeles. His first published composition was the Mass of the Compassionate Samaritan (1965). He collaborated with Willard Jabusch to produce the opera Francesco, which had its premiere at Orchestra Hall in Chicago in 1987. Mr. Kreutz is probaby best know among pastoral musicians for his contributions to Peoples Mass Book and for his Eucharistic hymn Gift of Finest Wheat which was first performed at the International Eucharistic Congress in 1976, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His compositions were always informed by his pastoral practice. For more than thirty years he served as a parish choir director in Lakewood, Colorado. Robert Kreutz died of heart failure on April 7, 1996, at the age of 74.