Charles Villiers Stanford

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was an Irish-born composer, conductor, organist, and teacher born in Dublin in 1852. He studied at Cambridge and continued musical study in Leipzig and Berlin. While still a young man he became organist of Trinity College, Cambridge, and helped raise the standards and ambitions of the Cambridge University Musical Society. In 1883 he joined the founding faculty of the Royal College of Music, where he taught composition for the rest of his life; from 1887 he was also professor of music at Cambridge. His pupils included Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Frank Bridge, and John Ireland.

Stanford composed symphonies, concertos, operas, chamber music, songs, and major choral works, but his Anglican service music, anthems, and hymn tunes have remained especially durable. He was knighted in 1902. ENGELBERG was composed as a setting of William Walsham How's For All the Saints and published in the 1904 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern.

Francis Bland Tucker's hymn did not yet exist when Stanford wrote ENGELBERG. The Hymnal 1940 later paired Tucker's 1938 text with Stanford's tune, establishing a lasting association that continues alongside Tucker's originally intended tune, SINE NOMINE.