Elgar’s Polyglot Ciphers in “The Apostles”

Christ in the Wilderness by Ivan Kramskoy (1872)

. . . Elgar, wishing to write his own libretto for the oratorio, The Apostles, began to collect material. As is well known, his knowledge of the Bible and the Apocrypha was profound. He certainly consulted his friends also, both in his own Roman Catholic church and in the Anglican, for instance Canon Gorton, who helped him a great deal in his researches.

William H. Reed in The Master Musicians: Elgar

The late romantic composer Edward Elgar (1857–1934) achieved international acclaim with the premiere of his Enigma Variations in June 1899 under the baton of the Wagnerian protégé Hans Richter (1843–1916). The work was revolutionary because its original theme was devised as a counterpoint to a famous melody that remains unheard and mysteriously absent. Elgar labeled the Theme “Enigma” before publication and the inaugural performance to convey this contrapuntal riddle, effectively ruling out the groundless speculations that this puzzling title was merely an afterthought or marketing ploy. In the 1899 program note, Elgar calls the Theme “Enigma.” He continues this practice in a later program note for an October 1911 performance at Turin where he refers to the opening movement as simply “Enigma.” Elgar never veered away from this consistent account of his melodic conundrum throughout his life and impressive career as one of England’s supreme composers.

Conventional scholarship asserts that the hidden melody is unfathomable because Elgar ostensibly took his secret to the grave. As Michael Kennedy opines, “People have ingeniously been trying to guess the tune ever since, a harmless but pointless recreation since the secret, if there was one, died with him”. Trapped within this interpretive framework, researchers have long presumed that no documentary or musical evidence survives to illuminate the identity of Elgar’s cryptic theme, thereby entombing the solution with the composer. Such certainty risks neglecting Elgar’s well-documented penchant for cryptography. Did Elgar truly leave behind no written or musical trace pointing to the secret tune’s identity, or is it time to lay that entrenched misconception to rest?

The only individuals who were privy to the covert Theme were Edward Elgar, his wife Alice Elgar (1848–1920), and their friend August Jaeger (1860–1909). Jaeger succumbed to tuberculosis in 1909, and Alice passed away from lung cancer in 1920, leaving Elgar as the sole guardian of the riddle. Following his wife’s death, Elgar incinerated his notebooks containing sketches of the Enigma Variations, destroying a trove of primary materials that would have shed light on the genesis and development of his masterpiece. If, as Michael Kennedy coyly suggests, there was never a hidden Theme, one must ask why Elgar took such extraordinary measures to insulate his sketches from future scrutiny. However, there remains another promising avenue of inquiry, one glossed over or entirely overlooked by musicologists. It hinges on Elgar’s obsession with cryptography, the art of encoding and decoding secret messages. Musicologists typically have little to no training in that arcane discipline, lacking the expertise and tools to identify and decrypt ciphers. Given Elgar’s expertise in that specialized field, it remains plausible that he enciphered the answers to the Enigma Variations within the orchestral score.

It is widely acknowledged that Elgar excelled in cryptography. His mastery of ciphers merits an entire chapter in Craig P. Bauer’s 2019 book Unsolved! A mathematics professor and editor of the journal Cryptologia, Bauer devotes the bulk of his attention to Elgar’s meticulous decryption of an allegedly insoluble Nihilist cipher published by John Holt Schooling in an 1896 issue of The Pall Mall Magazine. Elgar was so pleased with his solution that he bragged about it in his first biography, published with his full cooperation in 1905 by Robert J. Buckley (1847–1938). Cracking Schooling’s challenge cipher is the feat of an expert, not an amateur.

The Dorabella Cipher from Powell's biography

An outstanding specimen of Elgar’s mastery is his seemingly impervious Dorabella Cipher. In July 1897, he mailed an encrypted missive to a family friend named Dora Penny (1874–1964). Two years later, she would be immortalized as the dedicatee of Variation X with the Mozartian nickname Dorabella. Dora could not decipher Elgar’s coded message and filed it away for four decades before publishing it in her 1937 memoir. The ciphertext consists of curlicue symbols that take the place of letters. In one of his surviving notebooks, Elgar wrote a key for converting those cryptic symbols into plaintext. When that key is applied to the Dorabella Cipher, it produces what appears to be random cleartext. However, appearances can be deceiving, particularly in the case of a cipher.

Bauer reviews some purported solutions to the Dorabella Cipher and rejects them as untenable. This dismissal fueled a renewed push to penetrate one of Elgar’s most popular ciphers. Recent cryptanalysis found the Dorabella Cipher cleartext openly conceals eight discrete Spanish words. Although Elgar did not study Spanish, his wife was fluent in that Romance language. Consequently, these Spanish terms imply her participation. The first row of the Dorabella Cipher encodes the three distinct Spanish words: peca, y, and ir. The first is “peca” which means freckle or spot. The second is “y” which is the conjunction and. The third is “ir” which is the verb “to go.” Pairing these three discrete Spanish terms generates the message “Spot and go.” What could Elgar possibly mean by encoding this directive within the first row of the cleartext?

The relevance of this breakthrough is that there are four conspicuous spots on the Dorabella Cipher that some dismiss as random ink blotches. The only spot in the body of the ciphertext is located above the sixth character in the third line that pinpoints the cleartext sequence “EDU”. “Edoo” is Alice’s pet name for Elgar, sourced from the first three letters of Eduard, the German spelling of Elgar’s forename. That Teutonic pseudonym is the title of his musical self-portrait (E. D. U.) in the Enigma Variations. Shockingly, the vaunted experts failed to spot Elgar’s stealth pseudonym lurking within the Dorabella transcription because they did not apply Elgar’s notebook key and carefully sift the cleartext for any relevant patterns.

Elgar’s Dorabella Cipher Characters 66-68 “EDU”

The Dorabella Cipher’s ingenious system of dots encodes the Jesuit motto “AMDG” which is the acronym for “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam” (For the Greater Glory of God). Elgar inscribed this Latin dedication on his major sacred works such as The Dream of Gerontius. This covert expression of Elgar’s faith resonates with Dora Penny who was the daughter of an Anglican Rector and served in her father’s church choir. It is surprising how nobody previously managed to connect the dots and decrypt this Latin dedication, one written by Elgar on some of his Christian compositions.

The same dotted symbols encode an anagram of the German word “MAGD” which means “Maid.” That label is wholly appropriate for Dora Penny who was still a young maiden in 1897. These multilingual decryptions in Spanish, Latin, and German escaped the notice of investigators who naively assumed Elgar would restrict his cipher message to English. The use of multiple languages is a sophisticated technique that hardens a cipher against easy decryption. The Dorabella Cipher reflects Elgar’s flair for original codes that baffle professionals like Craig Bauer and Keith Massey.

In The Code Breakers, historian David Kahn theorizes that the solution to the Enigma Variations may be concealed within the Dorabella Cipher. His timing is faulty as the Dorabella Cipher predates the emergence of the Enigma Theme by 464 days. On page 800 he writes:

Even music has a touch of cryptography. About 1898, composer Sir Edward Elgar, best known for his Pomp and Circumstance march, wrote Variations on an Original Theme, in which he musically depicted in each variation a member of his circle of friends, his wife, and, to end the piece, himself. Elgar labeled the basic theme in G minor, on which the individual portraits were the variations, “Enigma,” and said that it was itself a variation on another piece of music—which he never disclosed. “The Enigma I shall not explain—its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed,” he wrote, adding, “. . . the principal theme never appears.” Many persons have tried to guess what the Enigma theme might be : a phrase from Parsifal, one from Pagliacci, or the theme of Auld Lang Syne. None has won acceptance. But it is possible that a clue to the Enigma lies hidden in a cryptogram that Elar sent to one of the “variationees” in 1897—Miss Dora Penny, the Dorabella of Variation X. As a girl in her twenties she spent much time with Elgar, and when she asked him about the Enigma, protesting that she simply could not figure it out, she was told by the composer, “I thought you, of all people, would guess it.” He would say no more. The cryptogram consists of 87 characters consisting of one, two, or three curves in various positions and looking as a whole rather like a flock of sheep. Nobody has solved it, and so nobody knows whether it will shed any light on the Enigma. But if it does, it may help resolve one of the oddest mysteries in the musical domain.

The multilingual solutions to various ancillary ciphers in the Dorabella Cipher bolster the prospect that Elgar would deploy multilingual cryptograms within the Enigma Variations. This impression is supported by the published score that employs four languages: English, German, Italian, and Latin. The number four is carefully emphasized in Variation XIII, a pelagic Romanza with an austere title of three hexagrammic asterisks. Elgar sprinkled some gargantuan clues about the secret melody in that movement. On four occasions, he cites a four-note melodic incipit from the concert overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage by Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847). The original German title of that overture is four words: Meerestille und glückliche Fahrt. These four Mendelssohn fragments are exhibited below with facsimiles from an autograph score of the title page and page 14 showing the source of the melodic quotation in the cello staff:

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (1828) Autograph Score (Cover Page)

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (1828) Autograph Score:
Page 14 Cello Solo cited in Variation XIII

Why would Elgar cite four thematic fragments, each consisting of four-notes, from an unrelated overture with a four-word German title? The stress on the number four is unmistakable. This line of inquiry fueled the deduction that Elgar quotes Mendelssohn in a symphonic work to imply by imitation that Mendelssohn quotes the covert Theme in one of his own symphonies. There are four fragments, each with four sounding notes, that place a pronounced emphasis on the number four. Is there a famous tune quoted by Mendelssohn that may be convincingly linked to that number? In the fourth movement of his Reformation Symphony, Mendelssohn quotes the famous hymn Ein feste Burg (A Mighty Fortress) by Martin Luther (1483–1546) followed by a set of variations.

Respected scholars such as Julian Rushton hastily ruled out Luther’s epic hymn as a credible candidate due to Elgar’s fervent Roman Catholicism in 1898-99. They cannot reconcile Elgar’s faith with a Protestant Reformer who was denounced as a heretic and excommunicated by Pope Leo X (1475–1521). What those highly credentialed academics fail to appreciate is that Mendelssohn was baptized into the Lutheran Church as a child, remained a committed Protestant in adulthood, composed the Reformation Symphony, and produced a large body of sacred works such as the oratorio Elijah and numerous settings of the Psalms. By citing the music of a Lutheran psalmist in Variation XIII, Elgar shines the equivalent of a klieg light on the composer of the covert Theme and its literary fountainhead. Mendelssohn’s Jewish heritage and Christian faith adds further clues about Elgar’s secret friend whose name “Jesus” and title “Christ” appear in the lyrics of Ein feste Burg.

The Mendelssohn fragments are like a small thread that, when tugged, unravels a vast tapestry of intersecting musical cryptograms and counterpoints. Far from being extraneous to the Enigma Variations, the Mendelssohn fragments conceal a rich cache of cryptograms that disclose and authenticate the covert melodic Theme and the secret friend memorialized in Variation XIII. A comprehensive survey shows they harbor more than a dozen ciphers that encode a highly specific set of mutually reinforcing solutions that disclose and authenticate Ein feste Burg as the melodic cornerstone to the Enigma Variations, and Jesus as the secret friend commemorated in Variation XIII.

Elgar’s Polyglot Ciphers in “The Apostles”

The Apostles is a monumental late-Romantic oratorio by Elgar that premiered under his baton at the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival in October 1903. The work was inspired by Elgar’s ambition to depict the early disciples of Jesus as ordinary men and women grappling with doubt, faith, and transformation. Drawing exclusively from biblical texts, Elgar centers the oratorio around Mary Magdalene, Judas Iscariot, and Peter—characters whose personal journeys reflect his fascination with spiritual struggle and outsider status. Noted for its system of leitmotifs and grand orchestration, The Apostles distinguishes itself by viewing the mission of Christ through the intensely human perspectives of his followers, culminating in the foundation of the Christian church and a musical blend of cosmic drama and intimate introspection.

The score of The Apostles applies a multilingual approach through its use of six languages across various performance and textual elements. The Latin dedication (A.M.D.G.), certain performance directions such as “Vox angelica” (Angelic voice), and specific references like “Constitues eos” appear in Latin, reflecting the work’s Roman Catholic devotional character. Following nineteenth-century oratorio conventions, the introductory materials and movement titles are presented bilingually in English and German. At the same time, the full orchestral score lists instrumentation in Italian, adhering to standard international practice.

The libretto assembled from scriptural verses is set in English. Performance directions throughout the score predominantly employ Italian terminology, the lingua franca of Western musical notation, with occasional phrases in English, French, German, and Latin interspersed for specific expressive purposes. Among the French terms, Elgar uses “large” (broad or wide) to indicate a particular temporal character. At Cue 223, the upper organ staff bears the marking “Voix celeste” (Heavenly voice), an evocative sonic instruction that complements the sacred atmosphere.

More extensive performance instructions, particularly those addressing staging or interpretive matters, appear in both English and German to accommodate international performance contexts. This bilingual approach extends to practical directions: certain timpani cues carry instructions in both languages, and six bars after Cue 219, the choir receives the command to stand through the bilingual directive “RISE” and “AUFSTEHEN,” ensuring clarity for performers regardless of their linguistic background.

A survey of The Apostles reveals that the full score employs six different languages:

1. Aramaic
2. English
3. French
4. German
5. Italian
6. Latin

The first letters of these six languages generate the quasi-acrostic anagram “ELGAr IF” with the second letter from Aramaic completing the spelling of the composer's surname. This anagram resonates with his self-effacing inscription on the short score of The Black Knight, “Music by Edward Elgar – if he can.” Such a solution reflects Elgar’s wit and penchant for cryptographic self-reference. Composed between 1889 and 1893, The Black Knight is a significant cantata or choral symphony based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of Ludwig Uhland’s ballad Der schwarze Ritter. This work is an ominous and compelling narrative about an enigmatic stranger—the titular Black Knight—whose sudden appearance at the court of a medieval king unleashes a series of catastrophic events.

A musical Polybius cipher embedded within the opening six bars of the Enigma Theme uses four different languages: Aramaic, English, German, and Latin. As previously observed, the first letters of those four languages produce the quasi-acrostic anagram “ELGAr.” Recognizing that the melodic solution to the Enigma Variations would be polemical, Elgar stealthily autographed the correct decryption to his Polybius cipher using a second tier of encipherment.

The six languages used in The Apostles also generate the acrostic anagram “FAE GL I.” The first is an acronym, the second is an abbreviation, and the third is an initial. The first acrostic anagram sourced from three languages (Aramaic, English, and French) is “FAE,” the acronym of Joseph Joachim’s Romantic German motto “Frei aber einsam” (Free but lonely). In Roman Catholic theology, reflections on the loneliness of Jesus focus on his trials at Gethsemane and Golgotha, scenes depicted in Part II of The Apostles. While composing that work, Elgar displayed an engraving of Ivan Kramskoi’s Christ in the Wilderness (1872) on the wall near his desk. This oil-on-canvas painting depicts Christ alone in the desert in the midst of a grueling forty-day fast.

The second acrostic anagram obtained from two other languages (German and Latin) is “GL,” a standard abbreviation of “Gloria” that appears in Roman Catholic references, lexicons, and church documents. “Gloria” is typically a shorthand for “Gloria in excelsis Deo” (Glory to God in the highest), a familiar liturgical hymn. In the introduction, Elgar refers to another well-known Latin hymn, the “Constitues eos.” He explains, “Use is made of a portion of the Gregorian tone (freely adapted)—“Constitues eos”—the Gradual in which power is promised to the Apostles and their successors for all time.” The Gregorian tone “Constitues eos” refers to the chant beginning with the Latin text “Constitues eos principes super omnem terram” (“You shall make them princes over all the earth”), a Gradual used in the Roman Catholic liturgy, especially for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. This chant is based on Psalm 45:17 (Vulgate numbering) and features a distinctive, ornate Gregorian melody, traditionally sung at Masses celebrating apostles or major church leaders.

The remaining language (Italian) supplies the Greek initial “I” for Jesus (ΙΗΣΟΥΣ), the first letter in the traditional Christograms IC, IHC, IHS, and INRI, and thus anchors the cipher’s final panel in explicit Christological symbolism. Drawing on this allusion, the “I” does more than complete a set of initials: it quietly marks Jesus as both the grammatical and theological subject of the inscription, the one subtle point of orientation in an otherwise fractured field of tongues. As the central figure of The Apostles, Jesus’s presence and loneliness are both literal and symbolic in the multilingual mosaic “FAE GL I,” for he stands at once surrounded yet isolated, named yet veiled, much as the Italian “I” itself stands alone at the edge of the anagram. In this way, the mosaic’s concluding letter becomes a miniature icon of the drama the work enacts: the solitary Christ at the center of a diverse and often uncomprehending world, whose scattered languages nevertheless converge on his hidden name.

A third possible anagram sourced from the six initials “AEFGIL” is “AGILE F.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines agile as “able to move your body quickly and easily” and “able to think quickly and clearly.” The latter definition is certainly applicable to Elgar. In Roman Catholicism, the initial “F” is a Latin abbreviation for Frater, Filus, Fecit, and Feliciter. “Frater” means brother and is often used as a clerical or monastic title before the name of a religious brother or friar. “Filius” means son and appears in genealogies, sacramental registers, and other church records. “Fecit” means “He did [it]” or “He made [it]” and appears on religious art to identify its creator. In historic or epigraphic settings, “Feliciter” means happily and successfully. Based on the preceding analysis, the anagram “AGILE F” may be read as “Agile Frater” (Agile Brother), “Agile Filus” (Agile Son), “Agile Fecit” (Agile He Made It), and “Agile Feliciter” (Agile Happily/Successfully). Elgar was an “agile” son, brother, and artist who happily and successfully produced The Apostles and other major works. These same labels equally apply to Jesus.

Elgar’s deployment of six distinct languages in the score of The Apostles subtly emphasizes the number six, a sum that Christian tradition closely associates with Christ’s passion and crucifixion. In Roman Catholic practice, Jesus’ death is commemorated on Friday, the sixth day of the week in the traditional liturgical calendar. The passion narratives further reinforce this association: Jesus languished on the cross for roughly six hours, from the third hour of the day until the ninth. In this reckoning, the third hour corresponds to 9:00 a.m., and the ninth hour is 3:00 p.m.

Mark’s Gospel reports that Jesus was crucified at about the third hour, conventionally reckoned as 9:00 a.m. in Jewish-Roman timekeeping. As the ninth hour approached, around 3:00 p.m., he cried out in Aramaic with the opening words of Psalm 22:1, his sixth utterance from the cross, before delivering his final, seventh saying and dying. The Synoptic Gospels also record that at the sixth hour, about noon, a supernatural darkness fell over the land and continued until the ninth hour, enveloping the crucifixion in an atmosphere of eschatological judgment and divine mystery.

Summation

This essay posits that Elgar’s reputation as an amateur cryptographer underestimates the depth and reach of his cryptographic prowess, an oversight that stunts a fuller understanding of the Enigma Variations and his oratorio The Apostles. After surveying the conventional view that the absent principal Theme of the Enigma Variations is unknowable because Elgar allegedly “took the secret to the grave,” the study reopens the question by foregrounding Elgar’s documented expertise in ciphers, including his impressive solution of John Holt Schooling’s Nihilist cipher and his innovative construction of the Dorabella Cipher. Recent multilingual decryptions of the Dorabella cleartext in Spanish, Latin, and German are shown to embed personal nicknames, devotional mottos, and epithets that collectively demonstrate a sophisticated, multilingual approach rather than a casual jeu d’esprit.

Building on this foundation, the article turns to the Enigma Variations and The Apostles to trace a network of musical ciphers that integrate numerical symbolism, language choice, and thematic quotation. In The Apostles, Elgar’s deliberate use of six languages (Aramaic, English, French, German, Italian, and Latin) generates acrostic and anagrammatic readings—“ELGAr,” “FAE GL I,” and “AGILE F”—that intersect with Joachim’s FAE motto, Roman Catholic liturgical shorthand, and Christological initials. These polyglot inscriptions are consistent with musical Polybius ciphers in the Enigma Theme and the Mendelssohn quotations in Variation XIII, which collectively support Ein feste Burg and Jesus Christ as the covert melodic and personal subjects of the Enigma Variations. Taken together, the evidence suggests that Elgar systematically deployed multilingual, musico-cryptographic devices across his major works, inviting readers and listeners to hear The Apostles and the Enigma Variations as interlocking experiments in theological and cryptographic concealment. A major implication of The Apostles Polyglot Ciphers—an apt allusion to Pentecost, when the disciples spoke in diverse tongues—is that Elgar employed cryptographic devices in works beyond the Enigma Variations and his Violin Concerto.

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