She found success in 1947 with a cantata setting Arthur Rimbaud's poem Ô saisons, Ô châteaux. The BBC refused to perform it at the time because the soprano range was thought to go beyond the bounds of the possible, but the BBC was nevertheless the organisation that gave first performances to many of her works from the 1940s to the 1950s. Her work in this period included incidental music for a number of poetry readings, such as Esmé Hooton's Zoo in 1956. The BBC began playing her music again when her friend William Glock became Director of Music. Lutyens is remembered for her intolerance of her better-known contemporaries among English composers including Vaughan Williams, Holst, Ireland, and Bax."cowpat music", Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, Oxford University Press. Retrieved 8 September 2020 She dismissed them as "the cowpat school" in a lecture she gave at the Dartington International Summer School in the 1950s, disparaging their "folky‐wolky melodies on the cor anglais".
