Elgar's use of phonetic spellings, particularly for names, is clearly established through his own personal correspondence where he sometimes signed his first name as Edwd. For example, he refashioned “ excuse ” as xqqq, and “ score ” as ckor, skore, skorh, skowre, skourrghe, csquorr, skourghowore, and sczowoughohr. His personal correspondence glistens with inventive respellings of common words. This pattern indicates Elgar fractionated the plaintext from the six-word 24-letter German title and assigned its letters to the 24 melody/bass note letter pairs of the Enigma Theme’s opening six bars using a musical Polybius box cipher key.īefore proceeding to a discussion of the full decryption, it is critical to recognize Elgar enjoyed experimenting with phonetic spellings. By expanding the search to a frequency analysis of melody/bass note letters from those same opening six measures, it was discovered that there is an eerily similar distribution of frequencies matching those found in the letters from Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. These results verify there are no clear correlations between the 11 discrete letters from the German title and the 6 discrete notes from the Enigma Theme’s opening six bars. A frequency analysis of 6 discrete notes from Enigma Theme’s opening six bars showed one with a frequency of 1 (F), one with a frequency of 2 (C), one with a frequency of 3 (D), and three with frequencies of 6 (A, B-flat, G). The conspicuous pairing of these Mendelssohn quotations with the Enigma Theme’s rhythmic structure implies some intimate connection between them.Ī frequency analysis of 11 discrete letters in the six-word German title Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott found three letters with frequencies of 1 (b, f, o), five with frequencies of 2 (g, i, n, r, u), one with a frequency of 3 (s), and two with frequencies of 4 (e, t). These Mendelssohn fragments are performed over a palindromic ostinato figure drawn from the Enigma Theme’s alternating pairs of quarter notes and eighth notes with the intervening quarter rests stripped out. The third fragment is performed in F minor by three trumpets and three trombones but lacks quotation marks because it diverges from the original major mode. These three fragments in major modes are enclosed by quotation marks. The first two Mendelssohn fragments are in A-flat major, and the fourth is E-flat major. He slows the tempo down, reconstructs the fragment in 3/4 time, and alters the key. Elgar’s treatment of these four-note segments departs from the original A major mode, 4/4 time signature, and faster tempo. This strongly suggests the cryptological technique of disguising word-lengths in ciphers by arranging letters in regular patterns.Ī separate line of this research centered on four melodic fragments cited in Variation XIII from Felix Mendelssohn’s concert overture Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt ( Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage) Op. McClelland, this recurring feature suggests spaces between words: Elgar’s six-bar phrase is achieved by the characteristic four-note grouping, repeated six times with its reversible rhythm of two quavers and two crotchets. Clive McClelland finds evidence for a coded message in the Enigma Theme’s opening six bars based on regularly spaced quarter note rests at the start of each measure. A saying is a string of words that typically form an adage. One definition of dark is secret or hidden. Such an interpretation of the phrase “dark saying” is made possible by the definitions of its terms. Besides a missing principal melody, Elgar acknowledged in the 1899 program note that the Enigma Theme has a “dark saying” that “must be left unguessed.” Such cryptic language insinuates the existence of a coded message hidden away within the Enigma Theme.
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