Sir Edward Elgar was an English composer who lived from 1857 to 1934. If you have ever attended a graduation ceremony in the United States, you have heard his music – his composition March No. 1 in D from Pomp and Circumstance Military Marches, Op. 39, is the de facto standard for processional music.
After a tiring day of teaching in 1898, Elgar was daydreaming at the piano. A melody he played caught the attention of his wife, who liked it and asked him to repeat it for her. So, to entertain his wife, he began to improvise variations on this melody, each one either a musical portrait of one of their friends, or in the musical style they might have used. Elgar eventually expanded these improvisations into his Enigma Variations, Op. 36.
The “Enigma” of the title refers to two puzzles contained within the work. The first puzzle is to determine which of Elgar’s friends each variation represents. Here is what Elgar had to say about the second puzzle:
The enigma I will not explain – its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the apparent connection 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 late dramas … the chief character is never on stage.
Variation 10 called “Dorabella” refers to Miss Dora Penny, a friend whose stutter or laughter is depicted by the woodwinds section. Elgar wrote a letter to Penny dated July 14, 1897, that enclosed another letter, enciphered by Elgar, which has become known as the Dorabella Cipher. She was never able to decipher it, and its meaning remains unknown to this day.
The true meaning of Elgar’s ‘dark saying’ in his Enigma Variations has never been determined. Years later, when Dora Penny questioned Elgar about the secret of the Enigma Variations, his only comment to her on the subject was this: “I thought that you, of all people, would guess it”.
Thank goodness he wasn’t a geocacher!! That’s the kind of code that would drive me batty.
In Elgar’s personal notebooks, he describes the cipher and provides a decryption key. In fact, he even gives some examples of messages encrypted with the key. It’s a simple substitution cipher consisting of 24 symbols – one, two, or three “c” shapes in 8 different orientations (rotated 45 degrees apart). However, the text derived by following the decryption key he gave leads to gibberish, which means there’s a secondary level of encryption going on.
This has now been solved – see
http://unsolvedproblems.org/S12x.pdf
No, the cypher has not been solved. I have found a standard frequency table that gives a plethora of words. I have managed to get about 1/2 of it without reaching – ie simple reversal of words and letter usages such as “das” for days. There are far too many matches for it to be a statistical anomaly. Where I am having trouble is with his weird vernacular which the rest seems to require. I actually have too many possibilities (words) rather than having to manufacture them. It is giving me a hedake, but is slowly coming around.
I have now solved the Cypher. With apologies to Tim Roberts and others, my solution comes straight from the cypher text, without strange words and other devices. See: http://www.aerobushentertainment.com/crypto/index.php?topic=174.0