Louis Lavater attended St Kilda Grammar School and Wesley College before enrolling at the University of Melbourne in 1884 to study medicine. Lavater did not complete his degree, following instead his love of music. He worked for several years in a bank, then moved to Colac where he established a music school, produced operas, organised choirs and operated a lending library of sheet music.
Lavater returned to Melbourne in 1914 and made a precarious living from his music, assisted by a one-pound pension from the Commonwealth literary fund. Nevertheless, his reputation remained stable and he was often asked to as a judge for musical competions.
Lavater was also an active member of the Melbourne literary community, joining the Melbourne Literary Club in 1916 and submitting many of his poems for publication in the club's magazine, Birth. He published three volumes of poetry and compiled an anthology, The Sonnet in Australasia (1926) which was enlarged, revised and edited with a foreword by Frederick Macartney in 1956. He also founded and edited the the 1930s little magazine, Verse.
He was a regular book reviewer and music critic for a number of newspapers and was active in many clubs and societies, including the Bread and Cheese Club, the Fellowship of Australian Writers and the Australian Literary Society. His musical works consisted of piano music, solo songs, choral songs and short works for piano and strings. While Lavater's work has received little comment, he was an important figure in Melbourne's literary society, attracting much praise on his death in 1953.
