Edward Elgar
The man, and the people he wrote for.
You cannot read this cipher without some sense of who wrote it. Elgar was a shopkeeper's son who taught himself, a Catholic in a Protestant establishment, an inveterate maker of private jokes, and a man who spent his life encoding the people he loved into his music. Dorabella is not an anomaly in that life. It is entirely typical of it.
The essentials
| item | date | detail |
|---|---|---|
| Born | 2 June 1857 | Lower Broadheath, near Worcester |
| Died | 23 February 1934 | aged 76, of inoperable colorectal cancer; buried at St Wulstan's, Little Malvern, beside Alice |
| Father | 1821–1906 | William Henry Elgar, piano tuner and music-shop keeper in Worcester; violinist, and organist at St George's Roman Catholic Church 1846–1885 |
| Siblings | Fourth of seven children | |
| Honours | 1904–1931 | Knighted 1904 · Order of Merit 1911 · Master of the King's Musick 1924 · created a baronet |
The outsider
Three facts shaped his career before a note of it was written.
He was Catholic. His mother converted shortly before his birth and had him baptised, over his father's disapproval. In Victorian Britain that was a social and professional handicap. It followed him into the work: The Dream of Gerontius (1900) sets a poem by Cardinal Newman, and the Dean of Gloucester banned it from his cathedral in 1901.
He was trade. He worked in his father's shop. When he proposed to Caroline Alice Roberts — daughter of a late Major-General, eight years his senior, herself a published author — her family were, in the plain wording of the record, horrified at her marrying an unknown musician who worked in a shop and was a Roman Catholic. She was disinherited. They married on 8 May 1889 at the Brompton Oratory.
He was self-taught. No conservatory. He learned from local teachers, from borrowed manuals, from the music library of Worcester Cathedral, and from reading Hubert Parry's articles in Grove's Dictionary. His only advanced formal instruction was a few months of violin study with Adolf Pollitzer in London, 1877–78. Between 1879 and 1884 he conducted the band at the Worcester and County Lunatic Asylum, which is where he learned by hand what each instrument could actually do.
A man assembled that way learns to work things out alone, and tends to enjoy it. That temperament runs straight through to the ciphers.
Alice
Caroline Alice Elgar was not a bystander. She became his business manager, social secretary and critic, managed his considerable mood swings, and pushed him into rooms he would not have entered himself. Their daughter Carice, born 14 August 1890, was named by contracting Caroline and Alice — which tells you, before any cipher, exactly how his mind worked with names.
Alice died of lung cancer on 7 April 1920, aged 72. Elgar was devastated, and his composing very largely stopped. Carice observed that he had always been able to spend hours on some perfectly unnecessary and entirely unremunerative undertaking, and that this grew stronger after Alice's death. The 1920s notebook full of cipher work belongs to precisely those years.
The friends — a portrait gallery
The Enigma Variations, composed October 1898 to February 1899 and premiered at St James's Hall on 19 June 1899 under Hans Richter, is the best map of Elgar's circle that exists. Each variation is a friend, sketched from life, usually with a private joke inside it.
| var. | label | who they were |
|---|---|---|
| Theme | Enigma | Said by Elgar to stand for the loneliness of the artist |
| I | C.A.E. | Caroline Alice Elgar — his wife |
| II | H.D.S-P. | Hew David Steuart-Powell — amateur pianist, played chamber music with him |
| III | R.B.T. | Richard Baxter Townshend — Oxford don and author |
| IV | W.M.B. | William Meath Baker — squire of Hasfield, Gloucestershire, and Dora Penny's uncle |
| V | R.P.A. | Richard Penrose Arnold — amateur pianist, son of the poet Matthew Arnold |
| VI | Ysobel | Isabel Fitton — his viola pupil |
| VII | Troyte | Arthur Troyte Griffith — Malvern architect, close friend; the music mimics his piano playing |
| VIII | W.N. | Winifred Norbury — secretary of the Worcester Philharmonic Society |
| IX | Nimrod | August Jaeger — editor at Novello, his closest friend and champion. Jäger is German for hunter; Nimrod was the mighty hunter of Genesis. A bilingual pun as a memorial |
| X | Dorabella | Dora Penny — the recipient of the cipher |
| XI | G.R.S. | George Robertson Sinclair — organist of Hereford Cathedral; the variation actually depicts his bulldog Dan falling into the River Wye |
| XII | B.G.N. | Basil George Nevinson — amateur cellist |
| XIII | * * * | Widely read as Lady Mary Lygon. Elgar used asterisks rather than initials; Michael Kennedy suggested plain superstition about thirteen |
| XIV | E.D.U. | Elgar himself — from “Edoo”, Alice's pet name for him |
Look at what that table is. A man who signs himself with his wife's pet name, hides a German-English pun inside a memorial to his publisher, portrays a friend by way of the friend's dog, and marks one portrait with asterisks instead of a name. Dorabella is the same instinct with the volume turned up.
August Jaeger — “Nimrod”
The friendship that mattered most. Jaeger kept him going through the worst of the doubt, telling him plainly that his time of universal recognition would come, and pushed him to expand the finale of the Variations. Nimrod is now played at the Cenotaph each year and at British memorial services generally — a piece of private affection that became national property.
Dora Penny — “Dorabella”
- lived
- 1874–1964
- family
- Daughter of the Rev. Alfred Penny (1845–1935) of Wolverhampton, long a missionary in Melanesia. Her mother died six days after giving birth to her. Her stepmother, from 1895, was a friend of Alice Elgar — which is how the families met
- friendship
- They met about eighteen months before the cipher. They cycled, flew kites, walked, and talked about maps, clothes and football. The record reads as warm and unromantic
- in the music
- Variation X. The traditional reading is that its fluttering woodwind gently parodies a hesitation in her speech
- testimony
- She wrote Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation (1937) as Mrs Richard Powell — the book that preserved the cipher after the original was lost. She never solved it
What Elgar said to Dora
She is the source of one of the most tantalising lines in the whole story. On the other unsolved puzzle — the hidden theme of the Variations — Elgar told her:
I'm surprised. I thought that you of all people would guess it.Elgar to Dora Penny, as she recorded it
Whatever he thought she had the key to, she did not have it. He trusted her with things: it was to Dora that he
said of the first Pomp and Circumstance march, I've got a tune that will knock 'em — will knock 'em
flat.
The puzzler
The cipher is not a curiosity bolted onto a composer. Puzzling was the constant.
- Chemistry. A serious amateur, with a laboratory in the back garden. He invented the “Elgar Sulphuretted Hydrogen Apparatus” and pursued a patent for it.
- Cryptography. He beat Schooling's supposedly unsolvable Nihilist cipher in 1896, was still proud of it a decade later, painted the answer on a wooden box, and kept working the same alphabet into the 1920s ([03]).
- Musical cryptograms. He built an allegretto on the letters G-E-D-G-E, the surname of a local headmaster's daughters — spelling a name in notes, which is Dorabella's trick in another medium.
- Names as puzzles. Carice. E.D.U. Nimrod. He could not leave a name alone.
- The rest. Cycling — he named his Royal Sunbeam “Mr. Phoebus”. Kite flying. Horse racing, which he was known to leave rehearsals early for. Wolverhampton Wanderers, for whom he wrote an anthem with the magnificent title He Banged the Leather for Goal. In 1923 he sailed up the Amazon to Manaus, apparently for no reason but to see it.
Two puzzles, both unsolved
He left exactly two, and it is worth keeping them apart:
The Dorabella cipher
87 symbols, 1897, to one friend. A concrete document with a concrete answer that we cannot read.
The Enigma theme
He claimed a larger theme “goes” through and over the whole set of Variations but is never played. Candidates from Auld Lang Syne to Pergolesi's Stabat Mater have been proposed and none confirmed. He took it to his grave.
These get conflated constantly, including by people announcing solutions. They are separate problems, two years apart, in different media. Solving one would tell you nothing certain about the other.
After Alice
He composed very little of substance after 1920. He moved between London and Worcestershire, made orchestral arrangements of Bach and Handel, wrote the Nursery Suite (1931), and became the first composer to take the gramophone seriously — recording his own major works electrically between 1926 and 1933, at tempi that startle listeners raised on slower modern readings. He began an opera, The Spanish Lady, and accepted a BBC commission for a Third Symphony. He finished neither, and asked W. H. Reed to see that nobody would “tinker” with the sketches. Anthony Payne elaborated them into a performing version in 1997 all the same.
He died in February 1934, leaving a body of work, two unsolved puzzles, and a notebook of cipher symbols drawn beside clock faces.
Sources for this page
Wikipedia — Edward Elgar · Wikipedia — Enigma Variations · Wikipedia — Dorabella Cipher · Nautilus — The Artist of the Unbreakable Code · Cipher Mysteries — Elgar's other little ciphertexts · Dora M. Powell (née Penny), Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation, 1937
Quoted remarks are short and attributed. Where a reading is traditional rather than documented — the speech-hesitation reading of Variation X, the identification of Variation XIII — it is flagged as such above.