Enigma Variations

The unusual melodic contours of the G minor opening theme convey a sense of searching introspection:

A switch to the major key introduces a flowing motif which briefly lightens the mood before the first theme returns, now accompanied by a sustained bass line and emotionally charged counterpoints.

In a programme note for a 1912 performance of his setting of Arthur O'Shaughnessy's ode The Music Makers, Elgar wrote of this theme (which he quoted in the later work), "it expressed when written (in 1898) my sense of the loneliness of the artist as described in the first six lines of the Ode, and to me, it still embodies that sense."[6]

Elgar's personal identification with the theme is evidenced by his use of its opening phrase (which matches the rhythm and inflection of his name) as a signature in letters to friends.[7]

The theme leads into Variation I without a pause.

Caroline Alice Elgar, Elgar's wife. The variation repeats a four-note melodic fragment which Elgar reportedly whistled when arriving home to his wife. After Alice's death, Elgar wrote, "The variation is really a prolongation of the theme with what I wished to be romantic and delicate additions; those who knew C.A.E. will understand this reference to one whose life was a romantic and delicate inspiration."

(In these notes Elgar's words are quoted from his posthumous publication My Friends Pictured Within which draws on the notes he provided for the Aeolian Company's 1929 pianola rolls edition of the Variations.)

Hew David Steuart-Powell. Elgar wrote, "Hew David Steuart-Powell was a well-known amateur pianist and a great player of chamber music. He was associated with B.G.N. (cello) and the composer (violin) for many years in this playing. His characteristic diatonic run over the keys before beginning to play is here humorously travestied in the semiquaver passages; these should suggest a Toccata, but chromatic beyond H.D.S-P.'s liking."

Richard Baxter Townshend, Oxford don and author of the Tenderfoot series of books; brother-in-law of the W.M.B. depicted in Variation IV. This variation references R.B.T's presentation of an old man in some amateur theatricals ‒ the low voice flying off occasionally into "soprano" timbre.

William Meath Baker, squire of Hasfield, Gloucestershire and benefactor of several public buildings in Fenton, Stoke-on-Trent, brother-in-law of R.B.T. depicted in Variation III, and (step) uncle of Dora Penny in Variation X. He "expressed himself somewhat energetically". This is the shortest of the variations.

Richard Penrose Arnold, the son of the poet Matthew Arnold, and an amateur pianist. This variation leads into the next without pause.

Isabel Fitton, a viola pupil of Elgar. Elgar explained, "It may be noticed that the opening bar, a phrase made use of throughout the variation, is an 'exercise' for crossing the strings – a difficulty for beginners; on this is built a pensive and, for a moment, romantic movement."

Arthur Troyte Griffith, a Malvern architect and one of Elgar's firmest friends. The variation, with a time signature of ¹
₁, good-naturedly mimics his enthusiastic incompetence on the piano. It may also refer to an occasion when Griffith and Elgar were out walking and got caught in a thunderstorm. The pair took refuge in the house of Winifred and Florence Norbury (Sherridge, Leigh Sinton, near Malvern), to which the next variation refers.

Winifred Norbury, one of the secretaries of the Worcester Philharmonic Society. "Really suggested by an eighteenth-century house. The gracious personalities of the ladies are sedately shown. W.N. was more connected with the music than others of the family, and her initials head the movement; to justify this position a little suggestion of a characteristic laugh is given."

This variation is linked to the next by a single note held by the first violins.

The name of the variation refers to Augustus J. Jaeger, who was employed as a music editor by the London publisher Novello & Co. He was a close friend of Elgar's, giving him useful advice but also severe criticism, something Elgar greatly appreciated. Elgar later related how Jaeger had encouraged him as an artist and had stimulated him to continue composing despite setbacks. Nimrod is described in the Old Testament as "a mighty hunter before the Lord", Jäger (which can also be spelt Jaeger) being German for hunter.

In 1904 Elgar told Dora Penny ("Dorabella") that this variation is not really a portrait, but "the story of something that happened".[8] Once, when Elgar had been very depressed and was about to give it all up and write no more music, Jaeger had visited him and encouraged him to continue composing. He referred to Ludwig van Beethoven, who had a lot of worries, but wrote more and more beautiful music. "And that is what you must do", Jaeger said, and he sang the theme of the second movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 Pathétique. Elgar disclosed to Dora that the opening bars of "Nimrod" were made to suggest that theme. "Can't you hear it at the beginning? Only a hint, not a quotation."

This variation has become popular in its own right and is sometimes used at British funerals, memorial services, and other solemn occasions. It is always played at the Cenotaph, Whitehall in London at the National Service of Remembrance. A version was also played during the Hong Kong handover ceremony in 1997 and at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games. The "Nimrod" variation was the final orchestral composition (before the national anthem) played by the Greek National Orchestra in a televised June 2013 concert, before the 75-year-old Athenian ensemble was dissolved in the wake of severe government cutbacks.[9]

An adaptation of the piece appears at the ending of the 2017 film Dunkirk in the score by Hans Zimmer.[10][11]

Dora Penny, a friend whose stutter is gently parodied by the woodwinds. Dora, later Mrs. Richard Powell, was the daughter of the Revd (later Canon) Alfred Penny. Her stepmother was the sister of William Meath Baker, the subject of Variation IV. She was the recipient of another of Elgar's enigmas, the so-called Dorabella Cipher. She described the "Friends Pictured Within" and "The Enigma" in two chapters of her book Edward Elgar, Memories of a Variation. This variation features a melody for solo viola.

George Robertson Sinclair, the energetic organist of Hereford Cathedral. In the words of Elgar: "The variation, however, has nothing to do with organs or cathedrals, or, except remotely, with G.R.S. The first few bars were suggested by his great bulldog, Dan (a well-known character) falling down the steep bank into the River Wye (bar 1); his paddling upstream to find a landing place (bars 2 and 3); and his rejoicing bark on landing (second half of bar 5). G.R.S. said, 'Set that to music'. I did; here it is."[12]

Basil George Nevinson, an accomplished amateur cellist who played chamber music with Elgar. The variation is introduced and concluded by a solo cello. This variation leads into the next without pause.

Possibly, Lady Mary Lygon of Madresfield Court near Malvern, a sponsor of a local music festival. "The asterisks take the place of the name of a lady[lower-alpha 3] who was, at the time of the composition, on a sea voyage. The drums suggest the distant throb of the engines of a liner, over which the clarinet quotes a phrase from Mendelssohn's Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage."

If it is Lady Mary, Elgar may have withheld her initials because of superstition surrounding the number 13,[13] or he may have felt uneasy about publicly associating the name of a prominent local figure with music that had taken on a powerful emotional intensity.[14] There is credible evidence to support the view that the variation's atmosphere of brooding melancholy and its subtitle "Romanza" are tokens of a covert tribute to another woman, the name most frequently mentioned in this connection being that of Helen Weaver, who had broken off her engagement to Elgar in 1884 before sailing out of his life forever aboard a ship bound for New Zealand.[15][16][17][18][19]

Elgar himself, nicknamed Edu by his wife, from the German Eduard. The themes from two variations are echoed: "Nimrod" and "C.A.E.", referring to Jaeger and Elgar's wife Alice, "two great influences on the life and art of the composer", as Elgar wrote in 1927. Elgar called these references "entirely fitting to the intention of the piece".[20]

The original version of this variation is nearly 100 bars shorter than the one now usually played. In July 1899, one month after the original version was finished Jaeger urged Elgar to make the variation a little longer. After some cajoling Elgar agreed, and also added an organ part. The new version was played for the first time at the Worcester Three Choirs Festival, with Elgar himself conducting, on 13 September 1899.[3]

Solutions in this category suggest a well-known tune which (in the proponent's view) forms a counterpoint to the theme of the Variations.

• After Elgar's death in 1934 Richard Powell (husband of Dorabella) published a solution proposing Auld Lang Syne as the countermelody.[33] This theory has been elaborated by Roger Fiske,[34] Eric Sams[35] and Derek Hudson.[36] Elgar himself, however, is on record as stating "Auld Lang Syne won't do".[37] Ernest Tomlinson revived the idea in 1976, providing his "proof" in the form of his set of variations Fantasia on Auld Lang Syne.[38]
• Reviewing published Enigma solutions in 1939, Ernest Newman failed to identify any that met what he considered to be the required musical standard.[39]
• A competition organized by the American magazine The Saturday Review in 1953 yielded one proposed counterpoint – the aria Una bella serenata from Mozart's Così fan tutte (transposed to the minor key).[40]
• In 1993 Brian Trowell, surmising that Elgar conceived the theme in E minor, proposed a simple counterpoint consisting of repeated semibreve E's doubled at the octave – a device occasionally used by Elgar as a signature.[41]
• In 1999 Julian Rushton[42] reviewed solutions based on counterpoints with melodies including Home, Sweet Home, Loch Lomond, a theme from Brahms's fourth symphony, the Meditation from Elgar's oratorio The Light of Life[43] and God Save the Queen – the last being Troyte Griffith's suggestion from 1924, which Elgar had dismissed with the words "Of course not, but it is so well-known that it is extraordinary no-one has found it".[39]
• In 2009, composer Robert Padgett[44] proposed Martin Luther's "Ein feste Burg" as a solution, which was later described as "[lying] at the bottom of a rabbit hole of anagrams, cryptography, the poet Longfellow, the composer Mendelssohn, the Shroud of Turin, and Jesus, all of which he believes he found hiding in plain sight in the music."[45]
• In 2021, architectural acoustician Zackery Belanger proposed Elgar's own "Like to the Damask Rose" as a solution, claiming that the fourteen deaths described in the song align with the fourteen variations. Belanger arrived at this conclusion in his attempt to solve Elgar's Dorabella Cipher, which he proposes has a rose-shaped key assembled from the cipher's symbols.[46]

A few more solutions of this type have been published in recent years. In the following three examples the counterpoints involve complete renditions of both the Enigma theme and the proposed "larger theme", and the associated texts have obvious "dark" connotations.

• In his book on the Variations Patrick Turner advanced a solution based on a counterpoint with a minor key version the nursery rhyme Twinkle, twinkle, little star.[47]
• Clive McClelland has proposed a counterpoint with Sabine Baring-Gould's tune for the hymn Now the Day Is Over (also transposed to the minor).[48]
• Tallis's canon, the tune for the hymn Glory to Thee, my God, this night, features as a cantus firmus in a solution which interprets the Enigma as a puzzle canon. This reading is suggested by the words "for fuga", which appear among Elgar's annotations to his sketch of the theme.[49]

Another theory has been published in 2007 by Hans Westgeest.[50] He has argued that the real theme of the work consists of only nine notes: G–E♭–A♭–F–B♭–F–F–A♭–G.[51][52] The rhythm of this theme (in ⁴
₄ time, with a crotchet rest on the first beat of each bar) is based on the rhythm of Edward Elgar's own name ("Edward Elgar": short-short-long-long, then reversed long-long-short-short and a final note). Elgar meaningfully composed this short "Elgar theme" as a countermelody to the beginning of the hidden "principal Theme" of the piece, i.e. the theme of the slow movement of Beethoven's Pathétique sonata, a melody which indeed is "larger" and "well-known".

The opening notes of the Beethoven theme (top) are repeated in the "Elgar theme" (bottom).

When the two themes are combined each note of (the first part of) the Beethoven theme is followed by the same note in the Elgar theme. So musically Elgar "follows" Beethoven closely, as Jaeger told him to do (see above, Var. IX) and, by doing so, in the vigorous, optimistic Finale the artist triumphs over his sadness and loneliness, expressed in the minor melody from the beginning. The whole piece is based on this "Elgar theme", in which the Beethoven theme is hidden (and so the latter "goes through and over the whole set, but is not played"). Dora Penny could not solve the enigma. Elgar had expected she would: "I'm surprised. I thought that you of all people would guess it." Even later she could not when Elgar had told her in private about the Beethoven story and the Pathétique theme behind the Jaeger/Nimrod-variation (see above, Var. IX) because she did not see the connection between this and the enigma.

If Robert John Buckley's statement about the theme being "a counterpoint to some well-known melody" (which is endorsed by what Elgar himself disclosed to F. G. Edwards in 1900) is disregarded or discounted the field opens up to admit other kinds of connection with well-known themes.

• Entries in this category submitted to the Saturday Review competition included the suggestions: When I am laid in earth from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, the Agnus Dei from Bach's Mass in B minor, the song None shall part us from Iolanthe and the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven's Pathétique sonata.[53] Elgar himself affirmed that this Beethoven theme is alluded to in variation IX.[54]
• In 1985 Marshall Portnoy suggested that the key to the Enigma is Bach's The Art of Fugue.[55] Contrapunctus XIV of that work contains the BACH motif (in English notation, B♭–A–C–B♮) which, in Portnoy's view, can also be found in the Variations. Moreover, the Art of Fugue consists of 14 individual fugues on the same subject (just as the Enigma variations are 14 variations on the same subject), and Bach signed his name "B-A-C-H" within the 14th fugue (just as Elgar signed his name "EDU" on the 14th variation), as well as other clues.
• Theodore van Houten proposed in 1975 Rule, Britannia! as the hidden melody on the strength of a resemblance between one of its phrases and the opening of the Enigma theme. The word which is sung to this phrase – a thrice-repeated "never" – appears twice in Elgar's programme note, and the figure of Britannia on the penny coin provides a link with Dora Penny.[56] The hypothesis has been further elaborated by Van Houten and others,[57] and its credibility has received a boost from a report that it was endorsed by Elgar himself.[58]
• Ed-Newton Rex superimposed the enigma theme on Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, showing a clear contrapuntal relationship. He claims that the theme being written on top of existing music is the logical way of theme being created, so that is the approach to be used in solving the enigma. It is also worth noting the double barline which encloses the area based on the Stabat Mater.[59]
• Other tunes which have been suggested on the basis of a postulated melodic or harmonic connection to Elgar's theme include Chopin's Nocturne in G minor,[60] John Dunstable's Ave Maris Stella,[61] the Benedictus from Stanford's Requiem,[62] Pop Goes the Weasel,[63] Brahms's "Four Serious Songs",[64] William Boyce's Heart of Oak (transposed to the minor),[65] the Dies irae plainchant[66] and Gounod's March to Calvary.[67]

• Ian Parrott wrote in his book on Elgar[68] that the "dark saying", and possibly the whole of the Enigma, had a biblical source, 1 Corinthians 13:12, which in the Authorised Version reads, "For now we see through a glass, darkly (enigmate in the Latin of the Vulgate); but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." The verse is from St. Paul's essay on love. Elgar was a practising Roman Catholic and on 12 February 1899, eight days before the completion of the Variations, he attended a Mass at which this verse was read.[69]
• Edmund Green suggested that the "larger theme" is Shakespeare's sixty-sixth sonnet and that the word "Enigma" stands for the real name of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets.[70]
• Andrew Moodie, casting doubt on the idea of a hidden melody, postulated that Elgar constructed the Enigma theme using a cipher based on the name of his daughter, Carice.[71]
• In 2010 Charles and Matthew Santa argued that the enigma was based on pi, following the misguided attempt by the Indiana House of Representatives to legislate the value of pi in 1897. Elgar created an original melody containing three references to Pi based on this humorous incident. The first four notes are scale degree 3–1–4–2, decimal pi, and fractional pi is hidden in the "two drops of a seventh" following the first 11 notes leading to 2⁄7 × 11 = 22⁄7, fractional pi. His "dark saying" is a pun set off by an unexplained double bar after the first 24 notes (all black notes)..."Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie (pi)". Shortly before his death, Elgar wrote three sentences about the variations and each sentence contains a hint at pi.[72]
• Some writers have argued that the "larger theme" is friendship, or an aspect of Elgar's personality, or that the Enigma is a private joke with little or no substance.[39][73][74][75]
• Inspector Mark Pitt has recently suggested (as reported by the Sunday Telegraph) that the larger theme is 'Prudentia' which in turn is related to the initials from the variation titles which then forms the Principal 'Enigma' Variations theme.[76]

• Complete variation on YouTube, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle in 2012