Dorabella Cipher

The text of the Dorabella Cipher, in Elgar's handwriting

The Dorabella Cipher is an enciphered letter written by Edward Elgar to Miss Dora Penny, which was accompanied by another dated July 14, 1897. Penny was never able to decipher it and its meaning remains unknown to this day.

The cipher, consisting of 87 characters spread over 3 lines, appears to be made up from an alphabet of 24 symbols, with each symbol consisting of either 1, 2, or 3 approximate semicircles, oriented in one of 8 directions. The orientation of several of the characters is ambiguous. A small dot, meaning and significance unknown, appears after the fifth character on the third line.

A count of the 87 characters reveals a symbol frequency very close to what would be expected if the cipher were a simple substitution cipher, based on a plain text in English, but attempts to decipher it along these lines have so far proved fruitless, leading to speculation the cipher may be more complex.

Background

Dora Penny was the daughter of the Reverend Penny of Wolverhampton. Her mother had died in Melanesia while her father was working as a missionary. Dora's father remarried and Dora's stepmother was a friend of Alice Elgar.

In July 1897, the Penny family invited Edward and Alice Elgar to stay at the Wolverhampton Rectory for a few days.

Edward Elgar was a forty-two year old music teacher who had yet to become a successful composer. Dora Penny was twenty years his junior. Edward and Dora liked one another and remained friends for the rest of the composer's life. Elgar named Variation 10 of his 1899 Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma) Dorabella, in dedication to Dora Penny.

Returning to Great Malvern, Alice wrote a letter of thanks to the Penny family on 14 July 1897. Edward Elgar inserted a folded note with cryptic writing, which, presumably, held some significance for the Pennys who would all have seen it. He pencilled the name 'Miss Penny' on the reverse.

This note lay in a drawer for forty years and became generally known when Dora had it reproduced in her memoirs: Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation, by Mrs. Richard Powell, first published by Methuen, London, in 1937. Subsequently the original note was lost, after being photographed, possibly in the publisher's office during The Blitz of 1941/42.

Dora claimed that she had never been able to read the note, which she assumed to be a cipher message. Yet no one else has been able to make much of it either; and it is by no means certain that the note is a cryptogram at all. One possible reason for sending an unreadable message is that it contained sentiments of affection from an older man to a much younger woman.

Yet, cryptic messages often excite suspicion and Elgar knew that the whole family would see it; so what might have been the innocent connection between Elgar's visit to Wolverhampton and the strange note? Kevin Jones advanced a view:

Dora's father had just returned from Melanesia where he had been a missionary for many years. Fascinated by local language and culture, he possessed a few traditional talismans decorated with arcane glyphs. Perhaps such an item surfaced as a conversation piece during the Elgar's week in Wolverhampton? And if Dora recalled this when writing her memoirs, it might account for the fact the coded message was referred to as an 'inscription' when communicating with the director of SOAS many years later.^[1]

Elgar was interested in ciphers. The Elgar Birthplace Museum preserves four articles from The Pall Mall Magazine of 1896 entitled Secrets in Cipher. There is also a wooden box which Elgar painted with his solution to a cipher that the fourth magazine article averred to be insoluble – a so-called Nihilist cipher. So, did Elgar produce an insoluble cipher of his own for the sake of a conversation piece or simply a joke? Elgar could not have known that the note would be preserved any more than he could have guessed at his impending fame.

And one reason for continuing interest in the cryptic note is that it is a celebrity cipher which is famous for being famous. It is from the pen of the man who wrote Pomp and Circumstance and whose head appeared on the British twenty pound note. Could there be a connection between Dorabella and the mystery of the Enigma Variation's original theme? Well, yes, there could, possibly, but this is an area in which there are many possibilities and few certainties.

Proposed solutions

Eric Sams, the musicologist, produced a translation of Dorabella in 1970.^[2] But, although he made a number of reasonable points, his method of attack is convoluted and hard, or impossible, to follow. His interpretation of the message is this:

STARTS: LARKS! IT'S CHAOTIC, BUT A CLOAK OBSCURES MY NEW LETTERS, A, B [alpha, beta, ie Greek letters or alphabet] BELOW: I OWN THE DARK MAKES E. E. SIGH WHEN YOU ARE TOO LONG GONE.

The length of this text is 109 letters (ignoring the parenthetic note on Greek), whereas the original text contains only 87 or 88 characters. Where do the extra 22 letters come from? Sams claims the surplus letters are implied by phonetic shorthand. Javier Atance has suggested a solution to the mystery. It is not a text but a melody. The 8 different positions of the semicircles turning clockwise correspond to different musical notes: position 1=do, position 2=re, position 3=mi, position 4=fa, position 5=sol, position 6=la, position 7=si, position 8=do. Each semicircle has 3 different levels corresponding to natural, flat or sharp notes.

Recent attempts on Dorabella

The Elgar Society advertised a Dorabella Cipher Competition in 2007 to mark the 150th anniversary of Elgar's birth. A number of entries were received but none were found to be satisfactory: "One or two entries did contain some impressively ambitious and thoughtful analysis. These entries, though, having matched Elgar's symbols to the alphabet, invariably ended up with a fairly arbitrary sequence of letters. ... [T]he results read as a disconnected chain of bizarre utterances, such as an imaginative mind could conjure up from any group of random letters".^[3]

References

1. ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/interact/puzzles/dorabellacode.shtml
2. ^ The Musical Times, Feb., 1970, (pp. 151-154), Elgar's cipher letter to Dorabella, by Eric Sams
3. ^ No longer on Elgar.org; archival copy at http://www.aerobushentertainment.com/crypto/index.php?topic=4.msg388#msg388

External links

• http://www.elgarfoundation.org/
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/interact/puzzles/variations.shtml
• Dunin, Elonka, 2006, The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms, ISBN 0-7867-1726-2 (contains an image of the cipher)
• http://unsolvedproblems.org/index_files/dorabella.htm