Ernest Seitz

Ernest Joseph Seitz (29 February 189210 September 1978) was a Canadian composer, songwriter, pianist, and music educator. He published some of his work under the pseudonym “Raymond Roberts” because he did not wish to be associated with popular music. His most famous work is The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise, which he co-wrote with Gene Lockhart. Some of his other notable songs include Laddie Boy (1932), When Moonbeams Softly Fall (1935), and The Sky’s the Limit (1943). He retired from performance in 1945 and from teaching in 1946. For the rest of his life he served as president of his family’s business, an automobile dealership in Toronto. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London in 1954, and on 18 July 1984, Toronto acquired a piece of parkland which was dedicated by Ms. Seitz, naming it Sunrise after Ernest’s most famous work. Life Born in Hamilton, Ontario, Seitz received his first musical training from A. S. Vogt in Toronto from 1903 to 1910. He went to Germany in 1910 where he was a pupil of Josef Lhévinne in Berlin for four years. He had initially intended to pursue a career as a concert pianist in Europe, but the outbreak of World War I made this imposs