Elgar's Enigma Theme Unmasked: November 2022

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Mozart's K. 147 in Elgar's Dorabella Cipher

W. A. Mozart in 3D by Hadi Karimi

The first real sort of friendly leading I had, however, was from ‘Mozart’s Thorough-bass School.’ There was something in that to go upon—something human. It is a small book—a collection of papers beautifully and clearly expressed—which he wrote on harmony for a niece of a friend of his. I still treasure the old volume.

Edward Elgar in The Strand Magazine (May 1904)

The English composer Edward Elgar (1857–1934) and his wife enjoyed a long weekend visit in mid-July 1897 with the family of Reverend Alfred Penny (1845–1934), the rector of St. Peter’s Collegiate Church in Wolverhampton. Caroline Alice Elgar (1848–1920) was a childhood friend of the Reverend’s wife, Mary Frances Baker, who married the widower in 1895 and became the stepmother of his only daughter, Dora Penny (1874–1964). On their return to Great Malvern, Alice penned a letter thanking the Penny family for their hospitality. Elgar added a short enciphered missive to his wife’s correspondence, addressing it to “Miss Penny” on the back. The incisive salutation is a classic Elgarian pun. “Miss” is an honorific title for an unmarried woman or girl, but it also functions as the verb “miss” to express regret or sadness over a person’s absence. Elgar was clearly missing Miss Penny when he created his cryptographic pièce de résistance. Dora was unable to decipher Elgar’s enigmatic script and filed it away for over 40 years before eventually publishing it in her 1937 biography, Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation.

Elgar’s coded message to Dora Penny is popularly known as the Dorabella Cipher. The name comes from Variation X of the Enigma Variations (1899), a movement dedicated to her that bears the title “Dorabella.” Elgar procured that playful pseudonym from a soprano role for a young unmarried woman in the opera Così fan tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. An operatic nickname for Dora was befitting because she was an avid vocalist who sang in the Wolverhampton Choir Society and her father’s rectory choir. As she recalled in her biography, “I was so mixed up with tunes in those days; Choral music, Church music, and orchestral music – and my own solo-singing, scenes from opera, songs, ballads –, and so on.” Four months before his visit to her father’s rectory, Elgar penned a letter to Dora in which he humorously comments about her weekly singing practices. He wrote, “Alice tells me you are warbling wigorously in Worcester wunce a week (alliteration archaically Norse).” This amusing excerpt is one of many examples where Elgar employs idiosyncratic spellings in his correspondence.

Variation X (Dorabella) from “My Friends Pictured Within”

The Dorabella Cipher consists of 87 curlicue symbols arranged in three rows of varying character lengths followed by a fourth row providing the date “July 14 [18]97”. There are 29 characters in row one, 31 in row two, 27 in row three, and 8 in row four. A conspicuous dot appears over the sixth symbol in row three. Three others appear in row four with small dots to the right of “1” and “4”, and a larger dot affixed to the bend in “7”. In all, there are 87 symbols, four rows, four dots, four letters, and four numbers on the Dorabella Cipher.

The Dorabella Cipher

Fortunately for investigators, the key to translating this confounding cast of characters into recognizable cleartext is preserved in one of Elgar’s surviving notebooks. A facsimile of that key is displayed below:

Elgar’s notebook cipher key

Elgar created three distinct glyphs using the lowercase c as the primary building block. His motive for selecting that particular letter is easy to surmise because c is the initial for cipher and cryptogram. There is persuasive evidence in support of this hypothesis as Elgar wrote some of those identical symbols around the word “Cryptogram” on an index card dating from 1896.

Elgar's “Cryptogram” card with ciphertext (circa 1896)

With his three prototypes assembled from one, two, and three stacked cs, Elgar systematically arranged them into eight different triplets using various angles and orientations to generate 24 alphabetic avatars. Elgar assigned the English alphabet’s 26 letters to these 24 odd characters by conflating i with j, and u with v. Combining similar glyphs is a standard convention of cryptography. The resemblance of some of Elgar's curlicue characters to the capital cursive “E” from his initials is deliberate, embellishing the cipher with his imprimatur in contrasting guises and angles. Relying on Elgar’s notebook key, the Dorabella Cipher converts into the following cleartext:

Elgar used twenty symbols from his lineup of twenty-four characters, omitting those for m, n, o, and z. The three contiguous absent letters (m, n, o) are an anagram of nom, the French term for “name.” That word appears in nom de plume, a French expression for a pseudonym or pen name. Elgar’s signature is conspicuously absent from his coded missive. Could this nom anagram sourced from his missing letters be a clue that Elgar’s name is hidden within the ciphertext? The absence of these four letters parallels the structural emphasis placed on that number by four rows, four dots, four letters, and four numbers. Elgar is clearly hinting at the importance of the number four. The explanation could be that the fourth letter of the alphabet is D, the initial for Dora, the four-letter name of the recipient of Elgar's message.

Cryptographers are baffled by the Dorabella Cipher’s seemingly incoherent cleartext. In his history of unbroken cryptograms titled Unsolved!, mathematics professor Craig P. Bauer concedes that the Dorabella Cipher appears to be a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher (MASC) in which one letter is replaced by one symbol. Gaps between words are excised to make the code even more difficult to unravel. Like modern ciphers, ancient Greek and Classical Latin text omit spaces between words in a practice called scriptio continua. Bauer laments that when applied to the Dorabella Cipher, none of the standard techniques for solving a MASC yield any sensible or credible results. Even the most advanced computer programs fail to make any inroads. A limitation of this approach is the presumption that Elgar’s message is a MASC restricted to English. Bauer briefly describes and dismisses purported solutions by Eric Sams, Tony Gaffney, and Tim S. Roberts, before concluding that the Dorabella Cipher has not yet been solved because Elgar’s system of encipherment must be “something more complicated.”

Recent cryptanalysis of the seemingly impregnable Dorabella Cipher determined that its dotted symbols encode solutions in Latin (AMDG) and German (Magd). Elgar penned the Latin abbreviation “AMDG” on some of his master scores as a sacred dedication, most notably The Dream of Gerontius. Used to refer to a young unmarried woman, the German word Magd means “maid” and “virgin.” This solution is consistent with the recipient of Elgar’s coded missive, Miss Dora Penny, the young unmarried daughter of Reverend Penny. The Dorabella Cipher also presents some English words as the note is addressed to “Miss Penny” and the month is shown as “July”. Remarkably, these three languages — English, Latin, and German — are an acrostic anagram of the first three letters of “ELGAR.” The linguistic sophistication of the Dorabella Cipher readily explains why experts failed to penetrate it since they naively assumed it was confined to English. Such a unidimensional mindset is utterly incompatible with an autodidactic polymath like Elgar. Unconventional methods, like Elgar’s odd spellings, are the keys to unraveling the Dorabella Cipher.

Three of the four absent letters (m, n, o, z) from the Dorabella Cipher are an anagram of nom, the French word for “name.” Remarkably, the dot above the sixth character in row three of the Dorabella Cipher pinpoints a familiar nickname for Elgar. Relying on Elgar’s notebook key, the raw decryption of the character below the dot in row three is the letter E. One dot in International Morse Code is also E. Consequently, the dot and the symbol encode Elgar’s initials (EE). Immediately following the encoded E, the next two characters encode the letters d and u/v. The small dot above the ciphertext in the third row tags the text sequence “Edu” which is one of Elgar’s primary nicknames.

Elgar’s wife coined the pet name “Edoo” using the first three letters of the German version of her husband’s forename, Eduard. Elgar assigned this pseudonym to his musical self-portrait in the Enigma Variations (1899), the martial Finale with the title “E. D. U.” Dora Penny was familiar with this pet name as she spent a substantial amount of time around the Elgar family and heard Alice call her husband “Edoo.” This fragmentary decryption confirms that the Dorabella Dots Dedication Cipher is covertly signed by its author. The solution comports with the feasibility of spelling nom from absent letters in the cipher and the glaring absence of Elgar’s signature from his note. The discovery of Elgar’s nickname is consistent with other cryptograms in the Enigma Variations that are similarly tagged by his name or initials.

Far from being a completely random assortment of letters as posited by investigators like Dr. Keith Massey, the cleartext presents a coded form of Elgar’s name expertly woven into the fabric of the cleartext. Elgar made it an obvious place to look because of the anomalous dot above the sixth character in row three. This “EDU” Dot Cipher furnishes the author's signature conspicuously missing from his missive to Miss Penny. It is astonishing that his signature remained undetected since the cipher was first publicized 85 years ago. One reasonably wonders what else the so-called experts failed to detect lurking just beneath the surface of the Dorabella Cipher cleartext. After all, Elgar's encoded signature was not difficult to spot.

A recent reassessment of the Dorabella Cipher uncovered yet another cryptogram connected with the anomalous dots in the fourth row where Elgar dated his mystifying message as “July 14 97”. There is no comma between the day and year, and the century (18) is omitted. One small dot appears next to the upper right of “1”, and another next to the lower right of “4”. There is a third larger dot next to the crook in “7” that constitutes the final character in the cipher. Scanning from left to right, these dotted numerals form the number “147”. The fourth row has four letters (July), four numbers (14 & 97), and three dots. Translating the number eleven into its corresponding letter of the alphabet using an elementary number-to-letter key (1 = A, 2 = B, C = 3, etc.) generates the letter “K.” Uniting that coded letter with the dotted numerals yields “K 147.”

Before attempting to decode the significance of “K 147”, it is first necessary to become acquainted with the work of the Austrian musicologist Ludwig Köchel. He established a chronology of Mozart’s compositions and assigned them sequential numbers. For example, the Requiem in D Minor is Mozart’s 626th work and is assigned the number 626. In 1862, Köchel published a comprehensive listing of all known compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart called the Köchel Catalogue. This first edition remained the standard reference source until undergoing revisions in 1905. Each Köchel number is preceded by his initial “K.” Consequently, “K 147” may be confidently read as “Köchel 147.”

Out of so many diverse possibilities, which one of Mozart’s works is listed by Köchel as the 147th? Could it be a piano sonata, a string quartet, a divertimento, or a symphony? On the contrary, it is a diminutive song for soprano and piano called “Wie unglücklich bin ich nit” (How unlucky I am). At only fifteen bars, it is a “sentimental love song . . . in which the fifteen-year-old Mozart pointedly depicts the sighs of a slighted lover . . .” The ensemble for “Wie unglücklich bin ich nit” is perfectly paired with Dora (a soprano) and Elgar (a skilled pianist and accompanist). Shortly after their first encounter, Elgar played piano for Dora. He soon bestowed on her the nickname Dorabella, a soprano role from Mozart’s Opera Così fan tutte. Elgar clearly associated Dora with Mozart’s music. The discovery of a coded reference to one of Mozart’s songs in the Dorabella Cipher indicates Elgar made this connection shortly after their first meeting at her father’s rectory.

Autograph Score of "Wie unglücklich bin ich nit" K. 147 (1772)

A published version of “Wie unglücklich bin ich nit” K. 147

“Wie unglücklich bin ich nit” was composed by Mozart in Salzburg during the summer of 1772. The author of the libretto is unknown and could be Mozart himself. A copy of this song appears in an 1869 book by John Ella published in London called Musical Sketches Abroad And At Home. A talented violinist, Ella inaugurated in 1845 an annual series of instrument and vocal concerts under the title the “Musical Union.” These gatherings often featured established artists who were new to English society. The appearance of Mozart’s song in Ella’s book suggests it was performed at one or more of these concerts. Such attention by a prominent member of London’s musical scene ensured that this gem was not neglected. Dora’s education and extensive experience in the vocal arts likely exposed her to Mozart’s early Lieder including “Wie unglücklich bin ich nit”.

The original German lyrics of “Wie unglücklich bin ich nit” are shown below with an English translation:

Wie unglücklich bin ich nit,
Wie schmachtend sind meine Tritt’,
Wenn ich mich nach dir lenke.
Nur die Seufzer trösten mich,
Alle Schmerzen häufen sich,
Wenn ich auf dich gedenke.

How unhappy I am,
How heavy are my steps,
When I direct them toward you.
Only sighs comfort me,
All my worries pile up,
When I think of you.

The lyrics artfully convey Elgar’s sadness over his recent parting from Dora Penny. Such a musical declaration from an older married man to a younger unmarried lady is flattering and suitable following their first meeting. With so many common interests and family connections, Elgar and Dora soon became good friends. Their friendship is movingly depicted by Variation X (Dorabella), a coruscating gem in the Enigma Variations. As one of the longest movements at 73 bars, Elgar clearly longed for Dora’s attention and company.

There is a secret melody that serves as the contrapuntal cornerstone of the Enigma Variations. Dora pleaded with Elgar to share the title of that mysterious melody, but he steadfastly declined her persistent overtures. When she begged for the solution, he replied, “Oh, I shan’t tell you that, you must find it out for yourself.” “But I’ve thought and racked my brains over and over again,” she insisted. He answered, “Well, I’m surprised. I thought that you of all people would guess it.” The reason Elgar suspected Dora, the daughter of an Anglican Rector who actively sang in church, would guess the hidden melody is because it is the famous hymn A Mighty Fortress (Ein feste Burg) by German Reformer Martin Luther. Little did Dora realize that the ending phrase from that Protestant anthem is quoted twice in Variation X by the inner voice. If only she had searched for the mysterious tune’s ending rather than its beginning, she would have soon unmasked the solution for herself, for she sang it many times in church.

The Enigma Variations conceal a principal Theme that is unheard and yet serves as the contrapuntal cornerstone of the entire work. Like the Variations, Elgar's Dorabella Cipher also harbors a secret melody, one that could be performed by Dora Penny's soprano voice and Elgar's facility at the piano. The Spanish Gaps Code in the Dorabella Cipher encodes the anagram “DORA CC GEM” (Dora sees gem). The dual Cs are remarkable because the soprano opens “Wie unglücklich bin ich nit” with an eighth note C followed by a half note C – two Cs. This “C-C” motif is reprised two more times in Mozart’s diminutive lied with one interrupted by a quarter rest that is conveniently covered by a solitary C in the piano accompaniment. Consequently, the “CC” in the solution to the Spanish Gaps Code cleverly alludes to the opening notes of the secret melody encoded by the Dorabella Cipher.

To learn more about the secrets of the Enigma Variations, read my free eBook Elgar’s Enigmas Exposed. Please help support and expand my original research by becoming a sponsor on Patreon.

Soli Yah Gloria

Sunday, November 27, 2022

The Dorabella Cipher's Spanish Gaps Anagrams

This sketch is an attempt to portray, in the compass of a few bars, the humours of a Spanish fête.

From Elgar’s program note for Sevillana (Scene Espagnole)

“AQUI ESTÁ ENCERRADA EL ALMA DE . . . . .”
(Herein is enshrined the soul of . . . . .)

Elgar’s Spanish dedication to his Violin Concerto

The English composer Edward Elgar (1857–1934) and his wife enjoyed a long weekend visit in mid-July 1897 with the family of Reverend Alfred Penny (1845–1934), the rector of St. Peter’s Collegiate Church in Wolverhampton. Caroline Alice Elgar (1848–1920) was a childhood friend of the Reverend’s wife, Mary Frances Baker, who married the widower in 1895 and became the stepmother of his only daughter, Dora Penny (1874–1964). On their return to Great Malvern, Alice penned a letter thanking the Penny family for their hospitality. Elgar added a short enciphered missive to his wife’s correspondence, addressing it to “Miss Penny” on the back. The incisive salutation is a classic Elgarian pun. “Miss” is an honorific title for an unmarried woman or girl, but it also functions as the verb “miss” to express regret or sadness over a person’s absence. Elgar was clearly missing Miss Penny when he created his cryptographic pièce de résistance. Dora was unable to decipher Elgar’s enigmatic script and filed it away for over 40 years before eventually publishing it in her 1937 biography, Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation.

Elgar’s coded message to Dora Penny is popularly known as the Dorabella Cipher. The name comes from Variation X of the Enigma Variations (1899), a movement dedicated to her that bears the title “Dorabella.” Elgar procured that playful pseudonym from a soprano role for a young unmarried woman in the opera Così fan tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. An operatic nickname for Dora was befitting because she was an avid vocalist who sang in the Wolverhampton Choir Society and her father’s rectory choir. As she recalled in her biography, “I was so mixed up with tunes in those days; Choral music, Church music, and orchestral music – and my own solo-singing, scenes from opera, songs, ballads –, and so on.” Four months before his visit to her father’s rectory, Elgar penned a letter to Dora in which he humorously comments about her weekly singing practices. He wrote, “Alice tells me you are warbling wigorously in Worcester wunce a week (alliteration archaically Norse).” This amusing excerpt is one of many examples where Elgar employs idiosyncratic spellings in his correspondence.

Variation X (Dorabella) from “My Friends Pictured Within”

The Dorabella Cipher from Dora's 1937 memoir.

Elgar’s notebook cipher key

Elgar created three distinct glyphs using the lowercase c as the primary building block. His motive for selecting that particular letter is easy to surmise because c is the initial for cipher and cryptogram. There is persuasive evidence in support of this hypothesis as Elgar wrote some of those identical symbols around the word “Cryptogram” on an index card dating from 1896.

Elgar's “Cryptogram” card with ciphertext (circa 1896)

Elgar used twenty symbols from his lineup of twenty-four characters, omitting those for m, n, o, and z. The three contiguous absent letters (m, n, o) are an anagram of nom, the French term for “name.” That word appears in nom de plume, a French expression for a pseudonym or pen name. Elgar’s signature is conspicuously absent from his coded missive. Could this nom anagram sourced from his missing letters be a clue that Elgar’s name is hidden within the ciphertext? The absence of these four letters parallels the structural emphasis placed on that number by four rows, four dots, four letters, and four numbers. Elgar is clearly hinting at the importance of the number four. The explanation could be that the fourth letter of the alphabet is D, the initial for Dora, a four-letter name.

Three of the four absent letters (m, n, o, z) from the Dorabella Cipher are an anagram of nom, the French word for “name.” Remarkably, the dot above the sixth character in row three of the Dorabella Cipher pinpoints a familiar nickname for Elgar. Relying on Elgar’s notebook key, the raw decryption of the character below the dot in row three is the letter E. One dot in International Morse Code is also E. Consequently, the dot and the symbol encode Elgar’s initials (EE). Immediately following the encoded E, the next two characters encode the letters d and u/v. The small dot above the ciphertext in the third row tags the text sequence “EDU” which is one of Elgar’s primary nicknames.

Elgar’s wife coined the pet name “Edoo” using the first three letters of the German version of her husband’s forename, Eduard. Elgar assigned this pseudonym to his musical self-portrait in the Enigma Variations (1899), the martial Finale with the title “E.D.U.” Dora Penny was familiar with this pet name as she spent a substantial amount of time around the Elgar family and heard Alice call her husband “Edoo.” This fragmentary decryption confirms that the Dorabella Dots Dedication Cipher is covertly signed by its author. The solution comports with the feasibility of spelling nom from absent letters in the cipher and the glaring absence of Elgar’s signature from his note. The discovery of Elgar’s nickname is consistent with other cryptograms in the Enigma Variations that are similarly tagged by his name or initials.

Far from being an entirely random assortment of letters as posited by investigators like Dr. Keith Massey, the cleartext presents a coded form of Elgar’s name expertly woven into the fabric of the cleartext. Elgar made it an obvious place to look because of the anomalous dot above the sixth character in row three. This “EDU” Dot Cipher furnishes the author's signature conspicuously missing from his missive to Miss Penny. It is astonishing that his signature remained undetected since the cipher was first publicized 85 years ago. One reasonably wonders what else the so-called experts failed to detect lurking just beneath the surface of the Dorabella Cipher cleartext. After all, Elgar's encoded signature was not difficult to spot.

Elgar’s earliest compositions such as Sevillana (1884) and Spanish Serenade (1891) gravitate to Spanish themes. Composed at the zenith of his career, his Violin Concerto (1910) offers a cryptic dedication in the Spanish language. Elgar’s interest in Spanish spurred further cryptanalysis of the Dorabella Cipher cleartext in search of Spanish terms. This endeavor uncovered eight discrete Spanish words: Peca, y, ir, cerré, se, es, sed, and ser.

The first (peca) in row one means “spot” and conforms with the conspicuous spots on the Dorabella Cipher. Occurring twice in the first row, the second (y) means “and.” The third (ir) in row one means “to go,” suggesting that one should go to the singular spot above the sixth character in the third row where Elgar’s nickname is unveiled. The fourth (cerré) in row two means “I closed,” an apt characterization of enciphering a message to conceal its contents. The position of cerré in the second row is directly above Elgar’s pseudonym in row three, visually confirming the source of this cryptic statement. The fifth (se) that bridges the second and third rows means “I know”, affirming that Elgar knows the solution to his concealed message. The sixth (es) as the beginning of row three means “is.” The seventh (sed) in row three means “thirst,” overlapping with the first two letters of “EDU.” The eighth (ser) in row three is the verb “to be.” The discovery of these Spanish words in the Dorabella cleartext indicates the participation of Elgar’s wife who was fluent in that romance language. These cryptograms evaded detection because cryptographers incorrectly assumed Elgar’s message could only be in English.

The word y (and) is the only single letter term among the other Spanish words with letter lengths of two (ir, es and se), three (sed and ser), four (peca), and five (cerré). Remarkably, the Spanish pronunciation of y sounds exactly like the letter e. Consequently, two ys in row one present a coded version of Elgar’s initials (EE).

There are a total of eleven Spanish terms in the cleartext of the Dorabella Cipher with some duplicates (se) and overlaps (se and es). Four correctly spelled Spanish terms with lengths of three letters or more (cerré, peca, sed, and ser) endorse the inclusion of shorter Spanish words of two letters or less (ir, es, se and y). These words consume 22 out of 87 characters for just over 25 percent of the ciphertext. Such a high percentage makes it highly improbable that so many Spanish words are coincidental and the unintended result of a random text string. With so many Spanish terms dispersed throughout the ciphertext, it was theorized that gaps of varying lengths between them could encode further information. To assess that possibility, a tabulation of character lengths for all gaps between Spanish words was compiled.

The cipher begins in row one with the first gap of one character before peca. The second gap has four characters between peca and y. The third gap has five characters between y and ir. The fourth gap has seven characters between ir and a second y. The fifth gap has twelve characters between y in row one and cerré in row two. The sixth and largest gap has seventeen characters between cerré and se that spans the second and third rows. The seventh gap has three characters between se and sed. The eighth gap has three characters between sed and ser. The ninth and final gap consists of fourteen characters that conclude row three. There are nine gaps with a total of 65 characters with sizes ranging from one to seventeen.

The first four gap lengths are 1, 4, 5, and 7. These sums correspond to the dotted numerals in the date (1, 4, and 7), and the dotted character in row three which represents e, the fifth letter of the alphabet. When the numbers 1, 4, 5, and 7 are converted into letters of the alphabet using a basic number-to-letter key (1 = A, 2 = B, 3 = C, etc.), they yield the plaintext A, D, E, and G. These letters pinpoint the four strings of the violin (E, A, D, and G). Elgar served as an orchestral violinist and taught that instrument at various schools. The splayed V-pattern of the dots in the date suggest the violin’s initial.

The next step in the cryptanalysis was to convert character lengths of the nine gaps in the cleartext between Spanish terms into corresponding letters of the alphabet using a number-to-letter key. This conversion relies on Elgar’s notebook key which condenses the cipher alphabet from 26 to 24 by conflating similar letters (i/j and u/v). The results of this number-to-letter conversion are summarized in the table below:

The application of a number-to-letter key to these nonsense text gaps using Elgar’s 24 character notebook cipher alphabet generates the following plaintext: A, D, E, G, M, R, B, C, and O. It is significant that four of these gap letters spell “DORA”: A, D, E, G, M, R, B, C, and O. It is conceivable that Elgar used a simple number-to-letter key to encode part of his message using the lengths of nonsense text strings separated by identifiable Spanish words. There are 169 possible anagrams obtained from these nine gap letters with correct spellings, and two results featuring “MR CODE,” a fitting title for Elgar who was fascinated by cryptograms. The remaining three letters (A, G, and B) are anagrams of gab and bag. Merriam-Webster defines gab as “talk” and “idle talk.” The first possible anagram “GAB MR CODE” is a decryption that reflects Elgar's desire to communicate in code.

Merriam-Webster furnishes numerous definitions of bag. When used as a verb, bag means “to get possession of by strategy and stealth,” “capture,” and “win.” A second possible anagram is “BAG MR CODE”, a solution that aptly describes the process of defeating Elgar’s cipher and capturing its solutions. Another definition for bag is “an assortment or collection especially of nonmaterial things” and provides the sample phrase “a bag of tricks.” A third prospective anagram is “MR CODE BAG”, a decryption that refers to Elgar’s cunning stratagems for concealing and hardening his ciphers.

A fourth possible anagram obtained from these nine plaintext letters is “DORA GEM BC.” Dora is the forename of the recipient of Elgar’s coded missive. Merriam-Webster defines a gem as “a precious or semiprecious stone cut and polished for ornament” and “a highly prized or well-beloved person.” The latter definition is heavily implied by the encoding of Dora’s name. “BC” is the acronym for “Before Christ.” A coded reference to “Before Christ” is a fitting reference to the daughter of an Anglican Rector who remained active in the church throughout her life.

A credible reading of the anagram “DORA GEM BC” is “Dora, a gem before Christ” with the repetition of the a. The conflation of Dora with gem produces the compound “Doragem,” a prospective wordplay on “Diadem.” A diadem is a jeweled headband or crown which is often adorned with gems. The New Testament describes the awarding of various crowns to those who follow Christ. These include a “crown of glory” (1 Peter 5:4), a “crown of righteousness” (2 Timothy 4:8), a “crown of rejoicing” (1 Thessalonians 2:19), a “crown of life” (James 1:12 and Revelation 2:10), and an “incorruptible crown” (1 Corinthians 9:24-27). The anagrams “GAB MR CODE,” “BAG MR CODE,” “MR CODE BAG,” and “DORA GEM BC” are collectively labeled the Spanish Gaps Anagrams Cipher.

The anagram “DORA GEM BC” (Dora, a gem before Christ) is a suitable declaration from an older married man to a younger unmarried lady is respectful and appropriate following their first extended visit. With so many overlapping interests and family connections, Elgar and Dora became fast and enduring friends. Their friendship is movingly depicted by Variation X (Dorabella), a coruscating gem in the Enigma Variations. As one of the longest movements at 73 bars, Elgar clearly longed for Dora’s attention and company.

Four languages are employed in the Dorabella cipher: English, German, Latin, and Spanish. The first letters of these four languages is an acrostic anagram of “LEGS”: Latin, English, German, Spanish. Why would Elgar encode a reference to legs in connection to Dora Penny? In her memoir, she recalls during Elgar's July 1897 visit that he performed some of his original compositions on the piano including excerpts from Lux Christi, Scenes from the Bavarian Highlands, and sketches from Caractacus. When she heard the lullaby In Hammersbach, she said, “That's lovely — I should like to dance to that.” “Elgar replied, I wish you would: I'll play it again.” She reports, “So much did he like it that I was called upon to ‘come and dance’ Hammersbach’ on several occasions at Malvern.” The “LEGS” Acrostic Anagram is a subtle reference to Dora’s proclivity to dance along to Elgar’s music.

There is a secret melody that serves as the contrapuntal cornerstone of the Enigma Variations. Dora pleaded with Elgar to share the title of that mysterious melody, but he steadfastly declined her persistent overtures. When she begged for the solution, he replied, “Oh, I shan’t tell you that, you must find it out for yourself.” “But I’ve thought and racked my brains over and over again,” she insisted. He answered, “Well, I’m surprised. I thought that you of all people would guess it.” The reason Elgar suspected Dora, the daughter of an Anglican Rector who actively sang in church, would guess the hidden melody is because it is the famous hymn A Mighty Fortress (Ein feste Burg) by the German Reformer Martin Luther. Little did Dora realize that the ending phrase from that Protestant anthem is quoted twice in Variation X by the inner voice. If only she had searched for the mysterious tune’s ending rather than its beginning, she would have soon unmasked the solution for herself, for she sang it many times in church.

Dr. Massey presents some persuasive evidence in favor of meaningless text strings in the Dorabella Cipher. His assessment may be correct regarding the non-Spanish sections of the cryptogram. That would explain why even the most advanced computer systems fail to yield any sensible results. Based on my independent analysis, however, the varying lengths of these “nonsensical” text strings segregated by Spanish words encode a message that includes the name Dora, the recipient of Elgar’s coded message. In a potent irony, Elgar deploys nonsense text strings to encode something entirely sensible. In the process, he secured a cryptographic coup that stumped the best and brightest for more than eight decades. My original research confirms that Elgar’s methods of encryption deployed in the Dorabella cipher are relatively straightforward and simple enough for a novice like Dora to unravel. To learn more about the secrets behind the Enigma Variations, read my free eBook Elgar's Enigmas Exposed. Please help support and expand my original research by becoming a sponsor on Patreon.

Soli Yah Gloria

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Elgar's "HIDE PSALM 46" Titles Cipher

Edward Elgar (Postcard c. 1910)

During railway journeys amuses himself with cryptograms; solved one by John Holt Schooling who defied the world to unravel his mystery.

Robert J. Buckley in his 1905 biography of Sir Edward Elgar

Today is the 319th day of the year with 46 days remaining until the arrival of 2023. November 15th marks the twentieth anniversary of “I Love To Write Day” founded by John Riddle. Now is an opportune moment to publish my 204th installment exploring the symphonic Enigma Variations by the British romantic composer Edward Elgar. Elgar excelled in coding and decoding secret messages, a discipline formally known as cryptography. His obsession with that esoteric art merits an entire chapter in Craig P. Bauer’s treatise Unsolved! The bulk of its third chapter is devoted to Elgar’s brilliant decryption of an allegedly insoluble Nihilist cipher conceived by John Holt Schooling that was published in an April 1896 issue of The Pall Mall Magazine. A Nihilist cipher is a derivative of the Polybius square. Elgar was so gratified by his solution to Schooling’s reputedly impenetrable code that he specifically mentions it in his first biography released in 1905 by Robert J. Buckley.

Elgar painted his solution in black paint on a wooden box, an appropriate medium as another name for the Polybius square is a box cipher. His methodical decryption is summarized on a set of nine index cards. On the sixth card, Elgar relates the task of cracking the cipher to “. . . working (in the dark).” His parenthetical expression using the word “dark” as a synonym for a cipher is significant because he deploys that same phraseology in the original 1899 program note to characterize the Enigma Theme. It is an oft-cited passage worth revisiting as Elgar lays the groundwork for his tripartite riddle:

The Enigma I will not explain – its ‘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.

Elgar employed the words “dark” and “secret'' interchangeably in a letter to August Jaeger penned on February 5, 1900. He wrote, “Well — I can’t help it but I hate continually saying ‘Keep it dark’ — ‘a dead secret’ — & so forth.” One of the meanings of dark is secret, and a saying is a series of words that form a phrase or adage. Based on these definitions, Elgar’s cryptic expression — “dark saying” — is a coded way of saying there is an enciphered message in the Enigma Theme.

A decade of trawling the Enigma Variations has netted over one hundred cryptograms in diverse formats that encode a set of mutually consistent and complementary solutions. Although that sum may seem extraordinary, it is entirely consistent with Elgar’s obsession with ciphers. More significantly, their solutions give definitive answers to the riddles posed by the Enigma Variations. What is the secret melody to which the Enigma Theme is a counterpoint and serves as the melodic foundation for the ensuing movements? Answer: Ein feste Burg (A Mighty Fortress) by Martin Luther. What is Elgar’s “dark saying” hidden within the Enigma Theme? Answer: A musical Polybius box cipher located in the opening six bars. Who is the secret friend and inspiration behind Variation XIII? Answer: Jesus Christ, the Savior of Elgar’s Roman Catholic faith.

The first persuasive evidence for the existence of musical cryptograms in the Enigma Variations was uncovered by Richard Santa back in 2009. A retired engineer and Elgar enthusiast, Santa (whose name means “Holy” and “Saint”) found the Enigma Theme’s opening bar encodes Pi, a mathematical constant describing the ratio of any circle’s circumference and its diameter. In his groundbreaking research, Santa determined the first four melody notes of the Enigma Theme sequentially approximate a rounded form of Pi (3.142) via its scale degrees in the key of G minor. Its opening melody notes are B-flat, G, C, and A; their corresponding scale degrees are 3, 1, 4, and 2, respectively. Santa generously shared an early draft of his paper with me during the summer of 2009 before it was published by Columbia University’s journal Current Musicology in March 2010.

Santa’s paper offered the tantalizing prospect there could be other cryptograms lurking in the Enigma Variations. That hunch was bolstered in August 2009 when Dr. Clive McClelland of Leeds University kindly forwarded to me his paper Shadows of the evening: New light on Elgar’s ‘dark saying.’ Although his melodic solution fails to satisfy key conditions articulated by Elgar, I eagerly read McClelland’s essay and was impressed by some of his insights. For instance, his analysis of the Enigma Theme’s opening six bars finds circumstantial evidence for a cipher. The basis for this suspicion is that regularly spaced quarter rests at the outset of each bar suggest spaces between words. As McClelland surmises:

Elgar’s six-bar phrase is achieved by the characteristic four-note grouping, repeated six times with its reversible rhythm of two quavers and two crotchets. This strongly suggests the cryptological technique of disguising word-lengths in ciphers by arranging letters in regular patterns.

Following McClelland’s line of reasoning, quarter rests uniformly dispersed over six bars with four melodic notes per bar would suggest that Elgar’s “dark saying” consists of six words with exactly twenty-four letters. Such a conclusion resonates with my thesis that Luther’s Ein feste Burg is the absent Theme because its complete German title is six words with a sum total of twenty-four letters. The numeric parallels are far too precise to be casually chalked up to coincidence. The synergy of Santa’s and McClelland’s insights precipitated an intense search for a musical cryptogram in the opening six bars of the Enigma Theme. My quest began in October 2009 and culminated in the detection and decryption of a musical Polybius cipher in February 2010. My discovery was first announced in September 2010 and has proven to be my most popular article. A more succinct overview of my decryption was released in August 2019. Below is the decryption of that sophisticated Polybius cipher.

The Enigma Theme’s Polybius cipher is the most sophisticated of all the cryptograms in the Variations. It uses 24 pairs of melody and bass notes to encode the 24 plaintext letters from the title Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. Elgar ingeniously reshuffles those 24 letters into a series of anagrams in English, Latin, and what he reasonably believed to be Aramaic in accordance with popular biblical commentaries near the turn of the century. Four of the six anagrams are spelled phonetically, an unexpected feature consistent with Elgar’s correspondence that incorporates inventive phonetic spellings. Some examples of these atypical spellings are listed below:

Bizziness (business)
çkor (score)
cszquōrrr (score)
fagotten (forgotten)
FAX (facts)
frazes (phrases)
gorjus (gorgeous)
phatten (fatten)
skorh (score)
SSCZOWOUGHOHR (score)
Xmas (Christmas)
Xqqqq (Excuse)
Xti (Christi)

Elgar’s reliance on four languages mingled with phonetic spellings was ostensibly intended to frustrate conventional decryption methods that presume a coded message is restricted to one language and conventional spellings. His education in three Roman Catholic schools ensured he was tutored in both English and Latin. He also studied German in the hopes of attending the Leipzig Conservatory founded by Felix Mendelssohn. Remarkably, the first letters of these four cipher languages is an acrostic anagram of “ELGAr”:

English
Latin
German
Aramaic

In a stunning cryptographic feat, Elgar signed the correct decryption to his musical Polybius box cipher employing a second tier of encryption only revealed by successfully unlocking the first. This is Elgar’s proverbial sealed envelope bearing the melodic solution to his Enigma. Supreme confidence in his unexpected answer is assured by Elgar’s stealth signature. He autographed the solution because he recognized it would be unguessed and polemical.

Elgar deposited subtle clues on the title page of the autograph score hinting at a Polybius square cipher. The most conspicuous is a tilted square on the lower left-hand side of the cover. This geometric figure overlays the same staves on the following page where he orchestrated Enigma Theme’s opening bars that house a musical Polybius square cipher. This is the only known instance where Elgar drew a square on the cover of a symphonic score. Within his tilted square, Elgar inserted multiple anagrams of the initials “EFB” accompanied by the capital letter “L” thinly disguised as a square bracket.

The Enigma Variations Autograph Score Title Page

Another breakthrough in 2013 unveiled the meaning and significance of the three asterisks in the cryptic title of Variation XIII (✡ ✡ ✡). It was determined those absent letters are cleverly encoded by the first initials of the titles from the adjoining movements. The first initials from the titles of Variations XII (B. G. N.) and XIV (E. D. U. & Finale) are an acrostic anagram of the initials for the covert Theme (Ein Feste Burg). Elgar deftly frames the question posed by the three asterisks with the answer hidden in plain view.

Elgar experimented with five different orderings of the movements, a process that, in retrospect, was carried out to construct this particular cipher. Such a possibility eludes musicologists such as Julian Rushton who irrationally speculate that Elgar lacked the time to construct any cryptograms. Such a conclusion conflicts with the established timeline. Elgar began composing the Enigma Variations on the evening of October 21, 1898, and completed the orchestration on February 19, 1899. Later that year, he appended 96 measures to the Finale between June 30 and July 20 for an additional 21 days. In all, Elgar invested 142 days composing the Enigma Variations, a period that afforded more than sufficient time and opportunity for Elgar to indulge his passion for cryptography.

The titles of the Enigma Variations are summarized in the table exhibited below. Its fifteen movements with divergent titles have a grand total of 187 characters. There is one dash, three asterisks, and fourteen pairs of parentheses for a total of 28, and 46 periods. There are nine sets of initials with 27 letters, seven words with 49 letters, and fourteen Roman numerals with 33 letters.

The acrostic anagram from the titles of Variations XII and XIV which unveils the initials of Ein feste Burg is an elementary cryptogram labeled the Letters Cluster Cipher. Its discovery eventually precipitated a much broader analysis of all the titles from the Enigma Variations with the goal of uncovering other meaningful and relevant groupings of proximate title letters. This approach is markedly dissimilar from Stephen Pickett’s surgical cherry-picking of single initials from titles and names to assemble a purported solution for the absent Theme. My investigation uncovered an array of terms linked to the absent Principal Theme, the Enigma’s “dark saying,” and the secret friend. The Letters Cluster Cipher was the proverbial tip of a much larger iceberg of coded information.

Another superlative example of a proximate title letters anagram found in the opening three titles of the Enigma Variations is “PIE CHRISTI ABIDE” (Pious Christ Abide). The first two words are in Latin, and the third is English. Remarkably, the spelling of the first word (PIE) is nearly identical to Pi, the mathematical ration lurking in the Enigma Theme's opening bar. In that same measure, a musical Polybius cipher encodes “GSUS”, a phonetic rendering of Jesus. Merging these companion decryptions from bar 1 yields “Pi GSUS” (Pi Jesus), a close approximation of “PIE CHRISTI.” It is surely significant that these divergent ciphers generate mutually consistent and corresponding solutions. Between 1863 and 1872, Elgar attended three Roman Catholic schools where he studied both languages. Remarkably, the spelling of the first word (PIE) is nearly identical to Pi, the mathematical ratio discovered by Santa lurking in bars 1 and 11 of the Enigma Theme. The Latin word for Christ appears in the title of Elgar’s first sacred oratorio, Lux Christi Op. 26. Published under the Anglicanized title The Light of Life, it premiered in 1896 and was extensively revised in 1899 — the same year Elgar completed his Enigma Variations.

The “HIDE PSALM 46” Titles Cipher

It is a privilege to report the discovery of yet another set of interlocking anagrams within the opening three titles of the Enigma Variations. Contiguous title letters in those first three movements encode the anagram “HIDE PSAlm.” The first word (HIDE) is formed by letters from Variations I (C. A. E.) and II (H. D. S-P.). The second term (PSAlm) is sourced from letters in the Theme (Enigma), Variation I (C. A. E.), and II (H. D. S-P.). Although there is no letter L in these titles, the Roman numeral for the number one (I) is a homoglyph (l) of a lowercase L. Interpolating the “I” as a lowercase “l” is consistent with Elgar’s pliable treatment of the E glyph in his Dorabella Cipher to duplicate the letters M and W. The anagram “HIDE PSAlm” accords with Elgar’s novel treatment of Ein feste Burg as the covert Theme to the Enigma Variations.

There are 150 chapters in the Book of Psalms. Out of so many possibilities, which Psalm did Elgar conceal? The answer is furnished by the number of letters in the titles of Variations I and II. There are four letters in the title of the first variation (ICAE), and six in the second (IIHDSP). When paired together, the attendant sums of these title letters from these contiguous movements convey a coded version of the number 46. When considered in the context of the “HIDE PSAlm” anagram, that figure implicates chapter 46 of the Psalms, the afflatus for Martin Luther's Ein feste Burg. This conclusion is bolstered by the “D” in Variation II which stands for David, the author’s name for Psalm 46.

David Playing the Harp by Jan de Bray (1670)

In a revealing gesture, Elgar substitutes the Star of David for standard asterisks in the title of Variation XIII (✡ ✡ ✡). This marine movement with the anomalous Mendelssohn quotations from the overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage is dedicated in secret to Jesus Christ. Elgar’s choice of stars is deeply symbolic as one of the many titles for Jesus is “Son of David” (e.g., Matthew 1:1, Matthew 9:27, Matthew 12:22-23, Matthew 15:21-22, Matthew 20:30-31). Stars are closely associated with Christ. A star announced his birth (Matthew 2:1-2) to the wise men from the East. In a vision, John of Patmos saw Jesus holding seven stars in his right hand (Revelation 1:16). Yet another title for Jesus is the “bright morning star” (Revelation 22:16). Relying on these biblical references, there is a sound theological foundation for concluding that stars are emblematic of Christ.

The titles anagram “HIDE PSAlm” may be elaborated by the inclusion of chapter 46, the initial “E” from Enigma, and “C” from Variation I. With these additional initials, it expands to “C E HIDE PSAlm 46.” C is a homonym of see. E is the initial for Elgar employed extensively in his correspondence and wife’s diary. Armed with these insights, this enhanced anagram may be read phonetically as “See Elgar hide Psalm 46.” The precision and specificity of this solution are nothing short of extraordinary, supplying an apt characterization of Elgar’s novel treatment of Ein feste Burg as the hidden principal Theme. As a stealth form of authentication, Elgar inserted his initials within this proximate title letters cryptogram. Elgar enjoyed signing his work.

Elgar initialed other cryptograms embedded within the Enigma Variations. For example, seven discrete performance directions in the first bar of the Enigma Theme generate the acrostic anagram “EE’s Psalm.” There are precisely 46 characters in this remarkable cryptogram, a sum that implicates Psalm 46. Like the titles anagram cipher previously described, this decryption unveils the author’s initials.

To learn more about the secrets of the Enigma Variations, read my free eBook Elgar’s Enigmas Exposed. Please help support and expand my original research by becoming a sponsor on Patreon.

Soli Yah Gloria