In July 1897 the composer Edward Elgar (later knighted) and his wife, Alice, spent a few days visiting friends in Wolverhampton - the Reverend Alfred Penny, his second wife, Mary, and their daughter from Alfred’s first marriage, Dora (his first wife died in Melanesia where the Pennys had been engaged in missionary work).
On July 14th 1897, after having returned from the visit, Alice Elgar sent a letter to Mary Penny (presumably to express gratitude for the hospitality).
Accompanying the letter was a note from Edward Elgar, addressed specifically to Dora (on the back of the note, Dora reports in her book Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation, he had written “Miss Penny).
The front of the note contained this:
The Dorabella Cipher
Dora was never able to decipher it and she appears to have been reluctant to ask Elgar outright what the message contained. She published a copy in her book, certainly in the 1949 edition and possibly in the earlier 1937 edition (research is ongoing).
Various people have attempted to resolve the message but all of the efforts have yielded results that are often so contrived that they are unconvincing.
My first involvement with the cipher was a complete accident. In September 2004 I was researching something unrelated online and I followed a link to a site called Something Real (now defunct).
There, in the Science and Tech forum in a thread entitled Elgar Cipher, a poster called Sydney had placed a copy of the image above with some background information, and asked for ideas on its solution.
My curiosity was piqued. Initially I thought a simple analysis would soon yield results, but it didn’t, and six years later I am, I think, on the right path to a solution, but I don’t have anything that I am prepared to say with any confidence is a viable and finalised product – I haven’t finished working on it and there’s still a great deal to be investigated.
Along the way I have encountered sources of useful information, not the least of which is work (both published and unpublished) by the late Eric Sams, a musicologist and Shakespeare scholar, some of which is in the process of being disseminated online by Director Erik Battaglia of the CENTRO STUDI ERIC SAMS in collaboration with, and with the support of, the Sams’ family.
One key piece of information that Eric Sams made available consists of a copy of one (or possibly two) pages from an exercise book maintained by Elgar, dating from the 1920s (well after the note was sent). On those pages are quite clearly examples of the cipher, complete with a sample mapping of symbols to letters, plus a variety of other useful and interesting pieces of information. The significance of some of the items on those pages has yet, I believe, to be fully understood.
The Dorabella Cipher (as it has come to be known) was apparently used at one time by the British Government’s Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park as one of a barrage of tests given to candidates for admission into the code-cracking team. No-one solved it (no-one was expected to) but the approaches candidates took as they analysed the symbols apparently helped to provide an insight into the way their mind worked.
The use of the odd symbols is not restricted to this note and the exercise book. Another example – much shorter – is seen penciled into the margin of a printed music programme that Elgar received when he attended a performance of music by Liszt in 1886. This example is sometimes referred to as the Liszt Fragment. An attempted solution to this fragment was offered by Anthony Thorley in 1977 and I managed to establish contact with Anthony recently. Now retired, he has a wealth of research on the cipher that he wants to publish. It will be interesting to see what he has uncovered.
It is possible that yet other examples exist – written materials on which Elgar worked are scattered among several collections, all of which are still being catalogued and analysed, and few of them (if any) are accessible online.
So that’s the rough and ready background. Next time I’ll present the initial analysis that I undertook and the results that didn’t make sense for months – and then suddenly looked very interesting indeed.
I can imagine how such projects become a consuming passion.
What interests me, among other things, is why Elgar would make public display of fragments of his cipher. It’s as though he is boasting about it, though I don’t think that inventing a cipher is really anything to boast about. It seems odd to write a dedication to his wife knowing that she cannot understand it. Perhaps “perverse” might be a better word.
Ciphers are generally used to protect messages and information from being understood by the wrong people. They can also be used for sacred purposes: the idea being that this is a special language for communicating with the god(s) which only the deity and initiates understand. Sometimes, the religion’s original language mutates with the passage of time into a de facto cipher, e.g. the Latin of the Catholic Church which was consciously used to restrict certain information (such as the text of the Bible) to the priesthood and make it inaccessible to ordinary people.
Good luck with completion of the decipherment.
It allowed Elgar to make notes to himself in a way that, if anyone else read them, wouldn’t make sense to others. He had a lifelong interest in ciphers – indeed, he had deciphered one that had been claimed to be uncrackable, so he was no slouch.
In those days personal ciphers were all the rage; people published coded messages to each other in newspapers (the Twitter of the day, I guess).
Not sure what you mean by a dedication to his wife – were you referring to the Enigma Variations? She understood the references there, as did everyone else.
The ciphered note was intended for a lady half his age (he was then about 40, Dora Penny was 20) and I’m pretty certain that he told her in advance exactly what he planned to do, and how to go about deciphering the message.
However, as Dora herself says in her book, there were occasions when what Elgar said to her went sailing over her head and she daydreamed until something snapped her out of it.
There has been speculation that the note might contain something salacious (considering the age difference) – indeed, I wondered that myself – but at that stage in their relationship they had barely been introduced to each other and he was still calling her Miss Penny.
By the end of his life they were still only very good friends and nothing more, and my gut feeling is that his note was (and is) in fact pretty prosaic.
I think he was suggesting in the note that he was going to be nearby attending a meeting (with a choir superintendent called Somerton), and that the two of them could make use of his spare time to do something together – perhaps exploring, cycling, walking, even attending a football match (they were both football buffs).
For me, what’s more fascinating is the stuff that’s arisen as a result of my explorations, such as the visual mnemonics (hairy footballs) and the possible rail fence variation based on music (coupled with its use as a compositional aid).
Hi,
Did Anthony Thorley explain how he decoded the Liszt fragment to GETS YOU TO JOY, AND HYSTERIOUS (http://www.benzedrine.cx/dorabella.html)? For the lide of me I can’t see how.
No, he didn’t, sadly. He indicated that he had a body of research and information that he intended to publish, and I figured I would not press him further.