“It is true that I have sketched for their amusement and
mine, the idiosyncrasies of fourteen of my friends, not necessarily musicians;
but this is a personal matter, and need not have been mentioned publicly. The
Variations should stand simply as a ‘piece’ of music. The Enigma I will not
explain – it’s ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed,
and I warn you that the connexion between the Variations and the Theme is often
of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and
larger theme ‘goes’, but is not played…So the principal Theme never appears,
even as in some later dramas – e.g., Maeterlinck’s ‘L’Intruse’ and ‘Les
sept Princesses’ – the chief
character is never on the stage.”
Edward Elgar from the 1899
program note for the Enigma Variations
"I had the good fortune to be thrown among an unsorted
collection of old books. There were books of all kinds, and all distinguished
by the characteristic that they were for the most part incomplete. I busied
myself for days and weeks arranging them. I picked out the theological books,
of which there were a great many, and put them on one side. Then I made a place
for the Elizabethan dramatists, the chronicles including Barker’s and
Hollinshed’s, besides a tolerable collection of old poets and translations of Voltaire and all
sorts of things up to the eighteenth century. Then I began to read. I used to
get up at four or five o’clock in the summer and read – every available
opportunity found me reading. I read till dark. I finished reading every one of
those books – including the theology. The result of that reading has been that people tell me that I know more of the life up to the
eighteenth century than I do of my own time, and it is probably true."
Edward
Elgar from a
1904 interview for The Strand Magazine
In the original program note for the ‘Enigma’ Variations,
Elgar mentions only one person by name: Maeterlinck. For a
symphonic work dedicated to his friends pictured within, Elgar could have easily
mentioned the names of any of a dozen or so friends. Instead, he does something
unconventional – citing the name of a contemporary dramatic writer whose works
are in French instead of English. For someone whose literary appetite dined almost exclusively on pre-nineteenth
century literature and theology, Elgar's reference to Maeterlinck
is oddly out of place. For this very reason it is worthy of more rigorous
analysis and study. Why? Because
Of all people why would Elgar mention Maeterlinck? There
are some unusual correlations between the names Maeterlinck and Martin Luther. First,
there are four matching letters in identical positions (M, A, T and L). Second,
there are three matching equidistant letters (R, I and N). Third, the first
names both begin with the letter M.
Recognizing Elgar’s lifelong penchant for anagrams, Maeterlinck was analyzed for possible anagrams
that may be credibly connected to Martin Luther. This resulted in the discovery
of at least two
anagrams drawing specific
attention to ‘Martin L’ and suggest Elgar copied that eminent theologian and composer. The anagrams are:
1. CEEK MARTIN L – Seek Martin L(uther)
2. C EE K MARTIN L – See E(dward) E(lgar)
copy Martin L(uther)
Maeterlinck consists of
eleven letters, three syllables, and begins with the letter M. None of the
names for Elgar’s friends ‘pictured within’ the Variations satisfy all three of
these criteria. However, there is one name connected to musical fragments
quoted in Variation
XIII that does: Mendelssohn. Incredibly, the names Maeterlinck and Mendelssohn both consist of 11 letters, three
syllables, and start with the letter M.
The possibility of this being a coincidence is highly
remote. Both names are of famous artists from continental Europe that e xhibit characteristics associated with Germanic spellings. Both names have
matching letters in the first and fifth positions (M and E), and two matching
equidistant letters (E and L). The matching letters in the first and fifth positions
present an interesting parallel since there are fifteen movements in the Enigma Variations.
The two matching E’s suggest Elgar’s initials, and the same could be said of
the matching letter M’s as they resemble two E’s face down. Is this Elgar’s way
of initialing a cryptographic connection between the
names Maeterlinck and Mendelssohn?
The equidistant letters again suggest that Elgar initialed this cipher, drawing special attention to Variation XIII with the double L’s. Although he originally identified Variation XIII with a solitary capital L, Elgar later added
a second L along with a letter M. The subtle message is the cipher key may be found in Variation XIII, or more precisely, keys. Were the extra letters 'ML' the initials for Martin Luther? The number thirteen is the equivalent of the letter M as it is the thirteenth letter in the alphabet. This invites the conclusion that the M and L together form the initials for Martin Luther, and that later Elgar added another 'ML' the reinforce this connection.
This analysis reveals some highly credible
connections between Elgar’s reference to Maeterlinck in the 1899 program note,
the Mendelssohn fragments in Variation XIII, and the composer of Ein feste Burg, Martin Luther. These correlations reinforce the case for Ein feste Burg as the covert Principal Theme to Elgar's 'Enigma' Variations.
1 comments:
The genius of your solution, of course, is our sense that, had we taken the time, we could have arrived at it also. However, a keen observer once said of Einstein that part of his genius was his inability to understand the obvious.
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