The word "Enigma", serving as a title for the theme of the variations, was added to the score at a late stage, after the manuscript had been delivered to the publisher. Despite a series of hints provided by Elgar, the precise nature of the implied puzzle remains unknown. Elgar's first public pronouncement on the Enigma appeared in Charles A. Barry's programme note for the first performance of the variations: Elgar provided another clue in an interview he gave in October 1900 to
The Musical Times, which reported: Five years later, Robert J. Buckley stated in his biography of Elgar (written with the composer's close cooperation), "What the solution of the 'Enigma' may be, nobody but the composer knows. The theme is a counterpoint on some well-known melody which is never heard…" Elgar accepted none of the solutions proposed in his lifetime, and took the secret with him to the grave. Attempted solutions commonly propose a well-known melody which is claimed to be either a counterpoint to Elgar's theme or in some other way linked to it. Musical solutions of this sort are supported by Dora Penny and Carice Elgar's testimony that the solution was generally understood to involve a tune, and by the evidence from an anecdote describing how Elgar encoded the solution in a numbered sequence of piano keys. A different school of thought holds that the "larger theme" which "goes" "through and over the whole set" is an abstract idea rather than a musical theme. The interpretation placed on the "larger theme" forms the basis of the grouping of solutions in the summary that follows.
Julian Rushton has suggested that any solution should satisfy four criteria: • a "dark saying" must be involved • the solution must find "another and a larger theme" that
goes over the entire work • the theme should be well known • it should explain Elgar's remark that Dora Penny should have been, "of all people", the one to solve the Enigma Furthermore, in Rushton's view, the solution (if it exists) "must be multivalent, must deal with musical as well as cryptographic issues, must produce workable counterpoint within Elgar's stylistic range, and must at the same time seem obvious (and not just to its begetter)". The prospect of gaining new insights into Elgar's character and composition methods, and perhaps revealing new music, continues to motivate the search for a definitive solution. But the conductor
Norman Del Mar expressed the view that Elgar probably did not wish the solution to be found and that it would damage the great popularity of the work if the Enigma were solved:
Counterpoints Solutions in this category suggest a well-known tune which (in the proponent's view) forms a counterpoint to the theme of the variations. • Several writers have proposed "
Auld Lang Syne" as the countermelody Elgar himself, however, is on record as stating "'Auld Lang Syne' won't do". • Reviewing published Enigma solutions in 1939,
Ernest Newman failed to identify any that met what he considered to be the required musical standard. • A competition organized by the American magazine
The Saturday Review in 1953 yielded one proposed counterpoint – the aria
Una bella serenata from Mozart's
Così fan tutte (transposed to the minor key). • In 1993
Brian Trowell, surmising that Elgar conceived the theme in E minor, proposed a simple counterpoint consisting of repeated semibreve E's doubled at the octave – a device occasionally used by Elgar as a signature, possibly because his name stated with E. • In 1999 Julian Rushton reviewed solutions based on counterpoints with melodies including
Home, Sweet Home,
Loch Lomond, a theme from Brahms's fourth symphony, the
Meditation from Elgar's oratorio
The Light of Life and
God Save the Queen – the last being Troyte Griffith's suggestion from 1924, which Elgar had dismissed with the words "Of course not, but it is so well-known that it is extraordinary no-one has found it". proposed
Martin Luther's "
Ein feste Burg" as a solution, which was later described as "[lying] at the bottom of a rabbit hole of anagrams, cryptography, the poet
Longfellow, the composer
Mendelssohn, the
Shroud of Turin, and
Jesus, all of which he believes he found hiding in plain sight in the music". • In 2019, Edward Newton-Rex proposed
Pergolesi's Stabat Mater as a solution, pointing to the close contrapuntal fit between this and the Enigma theme. In a 2025 paper, he argued that the only criteria the hidden tune need meet are that it should fit with the Enigma theme, that it should have been well-known at the time, and that it should not have been unknown to Dora Penny; and that the
Stabat Mater meets these. • In 2021, the architectural acoustician Zackery Belanger proposed Elgar's own "
Like to the Damask Rose" as a solution, claiming that the fourteen deaths described in the song align with the fourteen variations. Belanger arrived at this conclusion in his attempt to solve Elgar's
Dorabella Cipher, which he proposes has a rose-shaped key assembled from the cipher's symbols. A few more solutions of this type have been published in recent years. In the following three examples the counterpoints involve complete renditions of both the Enigma theme and the proposed "larger theme", and the associated texts have obvious "dark" connotations. • In his book on the variations Patrick Turner advanced a solution based on a counterpoint with a minor key version of the nursery rhyme
Twinkle, twinkle, little star . • Clive McClelland has proposed a counterpoint with
Sabine Baring-Gould's tune for the hymn
Now the Day Is Over (also transposed to the minor). • ''
Tallis's canon, the tune for the hymn Glory to Thee, my God, this night'', features as a
cantus firmus in a solution which interprets the Enigma as a
puzzle canon. This reading is suggested by the words "for fuga", which appear among Elgar's annotations to his sketch of the theme. Another theory has been published in 2007 by Hans Westgeest. He has argued that the real theme of the work consists of only nine notes: G–E–A–F–B–F–F–A–G. The rhythm of this theme (in time, with a crotchet rest on the first beat of each bar) is based on the rhythm of Edward Elgar's own name ("Edward Elgar": short-short-long-long, then reversed long-long-short-short and a final note). Elgar meaningfully composed this short "Elgar theme" as a countermelody to the beginning of the hidden "principal Theme" of the piece, i.e. the theme of the slow movement of Beethoven's
Pathétique sonata, a melody which indeed is "larger" and "well-known". When the two themes are combined each note of (the first part of) the Beethoven theme is followed by the same note in the Elgar theme. So musically Elgar "follows" Beethoven closely, as Jaeger told him to do (see above, Var. IX) and, by doing so, in the vigorous, optimistic Finale the artist triumphs over his sadness and loneliness, expressed in the minor melody from the beginning. The whole piece is based on this "Elgar theme", in which the Beethoven theme is hidden (and so the latter "goes through and over the whole set, but is not played"). Dora Penny could not solve the enigma. Elgar had expected she would: "I'm surprised. I thought that you of all people would guess it". Even later she could not when Elgar had told her in private about the Beethoven story and the
Pathétique theme behind the Jaeger/Nimrod-variation (see above, Var. IX) because she did not see the connection between this and the enigma.
Other musical themes If Buckley's statement about the theme being "a counterpoint to some well-known melody" (which is endorsed by what Elgar himself disclosed to F. G. Edwards in 1900) is disregarded or discounted the field opens up to admit other kinds of connection with well-known themes. • Entries in this category submitted to the
Saturday Review competition included the suggestions:
When I am laid in earth from Purcell's
Dido and Aeneas, the
Agnus Dei from Bach's
Mass in B minor, the song
None shall part us from
Iolanthe and the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven's
Pathétique sonata. Elgar himself affirmed that this Beethoven theme is alluded to in variation IX. • In 1985 Marshall Portnoy suggested that the key to the Enigma is Bach's
The Art of Fugue. Contrapunctus XIV of that work contains the
BACH motif (in English notation, B–A–C–B) which, in Portnoy's view, can also be found in the variations. Moreover, the Art of Fugue consists of 14 individual fugues on the same subject (just as the Enigma variations are 14 variations on the same subject), and Bach signed his name "B-A-C-H" within the 14th fugue (just as Elgar signed his name "EDU" on the 14th variation), as well as other clues. • Theodore van Houten proposed in 1975
Rule, Britannia! as the hidden melody on the strength of a resemblance between one of its phrases and the opening of the Enigma theme. The word which is sung to this phrase – a thrice-repeated "never" – appears twice in Elgar's programme note, and the figure of Britannia on the
penny coin provides a link with Dora Penny. The credibility of the hypothesis has received a boost from a report that it was endorsed by Elgar himself. • Other tunes that have been suggested on the basis of a postulated melodic or harmonic connection to Elgar's theme include
Chopin's Nocturne in G minor, the Benedictus from
Stanford's Requiem,
Pop Goes the Weasel, William Boyce's
Heart of Oak (transposed to the minor), the
Dies irae plainchant and
Gounod's
March to Calvary.
Non-musical themes •
Ian Parrott wrote in his book on Elgar that the "dark saying", and possibly the whole of the Enigma, had a biblical source,
1 Corinthians 13:12, which in the
Authorised Version reads, "For now we see through a glass, darkly (
enigmate in the Latin of the
Vulgate); but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known". The verse is from St. Paul's essay on love. Elgar was a practising Roman Catholic and on 12 February 1899, eight days before the completion of the variations, he attended a Mass at which this verse was read. • Edmund Green suggested that the "larger theme" is Shakespeare's sixty-sixth sonnet and that the word "Enigma" stands for the real name of the
Dark Lady of the Sonnets. • Andrew Moodie, casting doubt on the idea of a hidden melody, postulated that Elgar constructed the Enigma theme using a cipher based on the name of his daughter, Carice. • In 2010 Charles and Matthew Santa argued that the enigma was based on
pi, following the misguided attempt by the Indiana House of Representatives to legislate the value of pi in 1897. Elgar created an original melody containing three references to Pi based on this humorous incident. The first four notes are scale degree 3–1–4–2, decimal pi, and fractional pi is hidden in the "two drops of a seventh" following the first 11 notes leading to × 11 = , fractional pi. His "dark saying" is a pun set off by an unexplained double bar after the first 24 notes (all black notes)..".Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie (pi)". Shortly before his death, Elgar wrote three sentences about the variations and each sentence contains a hint at pi. • Some writers have argued that the "larger theme" is friendship, or an aspect of Elgar's personality, or that the Enigma is a private joke with little or no substance. • Inspector Mark Pitt has recently suggested (as reported by the
Sunday Telegraph) that the larger theme is 'Prudentia' which in turn is related to the initials from the variation titles which then forms the Principal 'Enigma' Variations theme. ==Subsequent history==