Before fame, there was a living room filled with love and music.
Before Engelbert Humperdinck was known as one of the greatest romantic voices of his generation, he was simply “Arnold” — the shy boy who used to sit by the old piano his mother played every evening in their modest Leicester home.
His mother, Olive, was not a trained musician, but she carried a natural sense of melody. Every night after dinner, she would hum tunes from her youth — old ballads and Irish folk songs. Engelbert would sit quietly nearby, absorbing every note, every pause, every sigh. “That’s where I learned to feel music,” he once said. “Not from a classroom, but from the way my mother’s hands moved across those keys.”
That piano became the family’s heartbeat. When Engelbert fell sick with tuberculosis at seventeen, bedridden for months, he could still hear his mother playing from the next room. He later recalled that her music gave him strength — it was as if each note was a promise that life would begin again.
Years later, after achieving fame with “Release Me,” he had that same piano restored and moved into his home in Los Angeles. “It’s not just wood and strings,” he said in an interview. “It’s the sound of my childhood, the sound of hope.”
🎵 Suggested listening: