He composed several operas, orchestral works, and chamber music, and especially many lieder, setting poems by authors writing in German, Russian, Spanish, Icelandic, English, and ancient Egyptian and Greek, among others.
He moved to Munich in 1920 and studied voice with Karl Erler and then, at the Musikhochschule München, piano with Franz Dorfmüller, organ with Ludwig Mayer, and composition with Walter Courvoisier.
[1] He composed the opera Lübecker Totentanz based on the art work [de] at the Marienkirche in Lübeck.
[1] He took part in the inaugural Ferienkurse für internationale neue Musik in Darmstadt in 1946, and accompanied Henny Wolff in selections from Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, songs from Ernst Krenek's Reisetagebuch, Op.
: 14, 19 In 1951, a concert at the festival of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Eugen Jochum, presented his Concerto for Two Pianos, Op.
: 30 In 1950, Reutter composed a "Hymne an Deutschland" which President Theodor Heuss suggested as the national anthem, but it was not chosen.
[1] Reutter received, among others, the Ludwig Spohr Award of Braunschweig in 1953, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1959 (with one star in 1975), an honorary doctorate from the Music and Arts Institute in San Francisco in 1976, and the Hugo Wolf Medal of the International Hugo Wolf Society in Vienna the same year.