Decoding the Dorabella Cipher: A Musical Mystery

From the strange Sator Square to the baffling Beale ciphers and the curious case of the Kensington runestone, there’s a fervent fascination with mysterious messages and unsolved puzzles. None more so, perhaps, than the Elgar Cipher, an enigmatic sequence of 87 characters, arranged in three rows, written by the famous English composer Edward Elgar in a letter to his friend Dora Penny in 1897.

What appears at first glance to be a whimsical doodle has puzzled experts, cryptographers, mathematicians, and amateur sleuths for over a century, and the true meaning behind these curious scribblings remains unknown. The thank you letter itself is entirely unremarkable, except for this cryptic addition, which has sparked endless speculation and debate.

Why are the Elgar symbols so enigmatic? Are they musical by nature? Is the Dorabella Code a love letter, a hidden message, or a joke with no punchline? Or is it, as some have suggested, nothing more than an elaborate hoax, designed to deliberately mislead anyone who tried to decipher it?

This time trip back to the late nineteenth century will attempt to shed light on the peculiar puzzle that is the Dorabella Cipher.

Sir Edward William Elgar was one of the most famous British composers in history. His most notable works include the Enigma Variations – which include a musical mystery historians and musicologists have yet to unravel – The Dream of Gerontius, which Elgar himself believed was his finest choral achievement, and the five Pomp and Circumstance Marches, made world-famous for their performance at The Last Night of the Proms, and which contain Land of Hope and Glory, an unofficial British national anthem.

He was born near Worcester in 1857 to piano tuner and professional-standard violinist William Elgar, and Ann Greening, a farmer’s daughter. From a young age his musical talent was evident, and aside from a brief hiatus as a solicitor’s clerk in the early 1870s, Elgar devoted his life to music.

In 1889, the as-yet unknown musician and composer married Caroline Alice Roberts (known by all as Alice), the daughter of Major-General Sir Henry Roberts, and it was through her connections that he became acquainted with the Penny family, and the story of the Dorabella Cipher begins…

The Penny family lived in Wolverhampton. Dora’s father, the Reverend Alfred Penny, eventually remarried after his wife died (six days after Dora was born), and Dora’s stepmother was friendly with Edward Elgar’s wife, Alice.

In July 1897, Edward and Alice Elgar went to stay for a few days with the Penny family at the Wolverhampton Rectory. When they returned home to Great Malvern in Worcestershire, Alice wrote a letter addressed to twenty-three year-old Dora thanking the Pennys for their hospitality.

While it’s far from certain, it’s believed that unbeknown to Alice, forty year-old Edward slipped a second letter into the envelope with the formal version of her name, ‘Miss Penny’, written on the back, rather than his affectionate nickname for her, Dorabella. This second letter contained the famous Dorabella Cipher, also known as the Elgar Code or the Elgar Cipher.

The code – if that’s what it is – is a cryptic sequence of 87 similar-looking symbols, arranged neatly in three rows. Each symbol consists of a series of loops or curved lines that resemble a series of ‘E’ shapes, rotated ‘C’s, or upturned ‘3’s, oriented in various directions. After the fifth character on the third line, a small dot (possibly a full stop) appears. These symbols appear to have been deliberately chosen and carefully written, perhaps suggesting an intentional code rather than random scribblings.

According to Dora Penny herself, the note sat in a drawer for four decades until she included a reproduction in her 1937 memoir Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation. The original has been lost and she claimed that she never knew its true meaning.

To Elgar, mystery symbols like these weren’t unusual. His love of ciphers, codes and puzzles was well-known, and in his 1898/99 work the Enigma Variations, the overall theme has left people guessing for well over a century. He said ‘The Enigma I will not explain – its dark saying must be left unguessed.’ The music has been forensically dissected, semi-quaver by semi-quaver, but there’s still no conclusive answer as to what it might be.

Indeed similar symbols to those in the Dorabella Code also appeared in an Elgar-annotated concert programme from 1886 which has become known as the Liszt Fragment – over a decade before the Dorabella Cipher. They also appeared in one of Elgar’s notebooks from the 1920s in an effort to solve a twenty-five year-old cryptogram puzzle set in Pall Mall magazine.

Put simply, no-one knows. The Dorabella Cipher has baffled everyone who’s tried to decipher it using all sorts of codebreaking tactics, including substitution and pigpen ciphers, as well as frequency analysis, computer algorithms that recognise complex patterns, and even artificial intelligence. Yet so far, all efforts, regardless of technical sophistication, are nothing more than speculative and none have been accepted by the wider cryptographic community.

One effort to solve the riddle using a pigpen cipher resulted in this seemingly nonsensical cleartext –

BLTACEIARWUNISNFNNELLHSYWYDUOINIEYARQATNNTEDMINUNEHOMSYRRYUOTOEHO’TSHGDOTNEHMOSALDOEADYA

A 1970 effort from noted Shakespeare scholar and musicologist Eric Sams resulted in this strange sentence (he claimed the additional letters were implied by phonetic shorthand) –

STARTS: LARKS! IT’S CHAOTIC, BUT A CLOAK OBSCURES MY NEW LETTERS, A, B BELOW: I OWN THE DARK MAKES E. E. SIGH WHEN YOU ARE TOO LONG GONE.

Using a simple substitution cipher, Tim S. Roberts offered –

P.S. Now droop beige weeds set in it – pure idiocy – one entire bed! Luigi Ccibunud luv’ngly tuned liuto studo two.

In 2011, a Canadian named Richard Henderson, again using a simple substitution cipher, reckoned he’d cracked it with this effort –

whY AM I VERY SAD, BELLE. I SAG AS WE SEE ROSES DO. E.E. IS EVER FOND OF U, DORA. I kNOw I PeN ONE I LOVe. All Of My Affection.

And in 2020 in a well-known European classical music journal called Musical Opinion, Wayne Packwood suggested that he’d finally found the solution to the Elgar Code – though it’s far from universally accepted:

A WOMAN IS LIKE CHESS ONE HAS TO MAKE MANY SACRIFICES FOR ITS QUEEN IT IS VICTORY SHE COMMANDS NOT DO BETTER.

In 2007, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Elgar’s birth, the Elgar Society organised a Dorabella Cipher Competition, and despite some entries containing ‘some impressively ambitious and thoughtful analysis’, most, they said, were little more than a ‘disconnected chain of bizarre utterances.’

The seemingly unbreakable code has given rise to several prevailing theories, each attempting to unravel the true nature of this strange sequence of symbols.

Simple Substitution Cipher

It could be a simple substitution code, where each symbol represents a letter of the alphabet. Many have tried this approach, assuming that it might be an anagram, a letter substitution, or a phonetic transcription, but no-one has yet produced a definitive solution. The assumption, perhaps, is that Elgar, known for his love of puzzles and ciphers, created this code as a playful challenge for Dora.

The Mystery of Music

Another theory suggests that the Dorabella Code might be a form of steganography, the practice of concealing information within another message or physical object to avoid detection. Did Elgar hide his message not through direct substitution but through musical notation or a visual code? Given his background as a composer, it may be that the cipher could encode musical notes or be related to a piece of music. Perhaps the symbols represent a melody, rhythm, or other musical elements that would only make sense when translated into a musical context? As with the substitution theory, there’s no evidence to suggest this is true.

To Amuse & Confuse

Perhaps more sceptically, it’s possible Elgar’s mystery symbols are an elaborate hoax or a playful doodle without any real encoded message. Elgar, well-known for having a mischievous sense of humour, might have created the cipher as a lighthearted joke without ever intending it to be solved.

A Love Letter

Elgar and Dora Penny maintained a close relationship until he died in 1934 – she died in 1964 aged 94 – and some believe that the Dorabella Cipher is a personal message between the two, possibly one that would only make sense to her or within the context of their friendship.

Despite these various theories, the true nature of the Elgar Cipher remains a mystery, and it continues to fuel endless fascination and speculation for everyone who attempts to solve it.

Is the answer hidden in plain sight, or will it forever elude those searching for it? Despite over a century of intrigue and countless attempts at deciphering its meaning, the Dorabella Cipher remains an elusive puzzle, a testament to Edward Elgar’s playful genius and the allure of unsolved mysteries.

Whether the cipher is a complex code, a whimsical game, or an elaborate riddle with no solution, it continues to captivate those drawn to the challenge of unravelling its secrets.