From Nautil.us: Composer Edward Elgar still has cryptographers playing his tune.
It was the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897. Through a
periscope, England was sailing along in all its hope and glory. That
summer Edward Elgar turned 40 and was slowly emerging as the country’s
greatest composer. For the jubilee he’d written The Imperial March, a foreshadowing of the Pomp and Circumstance marches that would make him famous. Earlier in the year he’d presented King Olaf, a foreshadowing of the choral and orchestral works that would make him great, including The Dream of Gerontius and Variations on an Original Theme (“Enigma”), known as the Enigma Variations.
In the middle of that July, Elgar was in the midst of writing a new festival work, Te Deum and Benedictus,
working inside a large tent set up in the front garden of the house in
Malvern, in the south of England where he lived with his wife and
daughter. Above the tent, a flag fluttered to signify the composer was
at work. Inside, amid scattered music sheets, Elgar wrote furiously,
occasionally stopping to muse on a 40-mile view of the hills and heaths,
and the Druid ruins that inspired him.
Elgar was ever the
mercurial outsider—a tall, thin man with his bully moustache, the
countenance of an ascetic atop a footballer’s body—the son of a
piano-tuner, completely self-taught, “from harmony to fugue,” an early
biographer wrote, hurried and self-divided, always in and out of love
with music, always tossed between exuberance and despair, and forever
obsessed with ciphers, riddles, and word tricks, not to mention his
passion for “public mysteryfication,” as music critic and his longtime
friend Ernest Newman put it.
On July 14, following a visit the
previous weekend to some family friends, the Reverend and Mrs. Alfred
Penny, Elgar spun off what looked like a drawing or scribble and gave it
to his wife, Alice, to attach to a thank-you note. It was intended for
Dora Penny, a 23-year-old ardent admirer, who sang in a local choral
group and liked to dance.
They’d known each for a year and a
half; she was not a lover, rather an entertainment, a colorful Aquarian
butterfly with which to go biking, kiting, and strolling through the
bracken and harebells of Malvern; someone who could read music well
enough to turn the pages at the piano bench, but with whom he could also
could talk about maps, fashion, and the fortunes of the Wolverhampton
Wanderers football team. He nicknamed her Dorabella.
Elgar’s
scribble was actually a cipher. It consisted of 87 glyphs unevenly
spread over three lines. It contained 24 different symbols that featured
one, two, or three cusps or curves. The glyphs were tilted in what
appeared to be eight various angles. In a glance it gave the sense of
seagulls, or sheep, or bits of stubble.
Dora looked at it, couldn’t
figure it out, put it in a drawer, and didn’t draw it out again for 40
years.
The
scribble, known as the Dorabella Cipher, has never been decrypted and
stands with such other famous unsolved puzzles as the Voynich
Manuscript, a 240-page codex dating from the 15th century; the Phaistos
Disk, an apparently Bronze-age piece of clay found in Crete in 1908; and
the Zodiac Killer ciphers of the 1960s and ’70s.
Countless
cryptographers have ardently attempted to crack the Dorabella Cipher,
employing deft math and analysis. A few quite accomplished cryptanalysts
insist they have solved it. But the Elgar Society begs to differ.
They’re the self-acknowledged arbiters in the matter, the Union Jack
flying proudly above their whistling teapot. Their argument is that any
solution must decode the cipher and, at the same time, be self-evident,
so that Elgar aficionados everywhere can turn to each other and agree,
“Of course. Why didn’t we see it?”...MUCH MORE
