Hans Engelmann

Hans Engelmann was a German-born American composer and pianist born in Berlin on June 16, 1872. According to a contemporary obituary in The Etude, he began piano study at seven, received musical training that included study in Leipzig, and emigrated to the United States in 1891. He settled in Philadelphia, worked as a pianist and teacher, and became an exceptionally prolific composer of salon, educational, and popular piano music.

His best-known composition during his lifetime was Melody of Love, Op. 600, published by Theodore Presser in Philadelphia in 1903. Surviving copies in university sheet-music collections confirm the title, publisher, and date. The piece continued to circulate long after Engelmann’s death and later acquired additional lyrics and popular recordings in the twentieth century.

Hymnological research has shown that Luther Bridgers adapted musical material from Melody of Love when creating the tune now associated with There’s Within My Heart a Melody. Engelmann was not involved in Bridgers’s hymn text or its 1910 publication, but recognition of his source composition corrects the impression that the hymn tune arose entirely independently. Engelmann died on May 5, 1914.