The Enigma Variations

It is twenty past nine on the evening of Saturday the twenty-first of October 1898, in the upstairs drawing-room of Forli, the Elgar family house on the Alexandra Road at Malvern Wells, Worcestershire, with the south view through the bay window down across the Malvern valley toward the Severn. He is forty-one years old. He is Edward William Elgar, born at Broadheath outside Worcester on the second of June 1857, son of William Elgar the piano-tuner-and-organist of Broadheath and Anne Greening of Weston Underwood, schooled at Littleton House School in Worcester (left at fifteen for a solicitor's office, returned to music within twelve months), self-taught composer, standing organist of St George's Roman Catholic Church Worcester since 1885, married Caroline Alice Roberts of Redmarley d'Abitot in 1889, in his ninth year of marriage and his daily teaching practice at Malvern Girls' College and the private violin-pupil circuit of Malvern.

He sits at the upright piano (a Broadwood of 1885, his daily instrument). He lights a cigar. He plays a improvised theme in G minor, six bars, with a rising-and-falling counter-line in the bass. Alice, his wife, fifty, is sitting on the sofa knitting; their daughter Carice, eight, is in bed.

Alice, by Elgar's own letter to Jaeger of December (the primary source for the genesis of the Variations), says: that's nice. Elgar says: no, it's just a tune I'm playing. Alice says: yes, but it's nice. Play it again. Elgar plays it again. Alice says: now imagine my friend Hew Steuart-Powell playing it. How would he play it?

Elgar plays the theme in the manner of his friend Hew Steuart-Powell, the amateur pianist who is a friend of the Elgars' (the variation that became Variation II, H.D.S-P.). Alice says: now imagine Richard Baxter Townshend playing it. Elgar plays it in the manner of R. B. Townshend, the Malvern eccentric who is also a friend (the variation that became Variation III, R.B.T.). The game continues through the evening: William Meath Baker the squire of Hasfield (Variation IV, W.M.B.); Richard Townshend's brother Townshend (V, R.P.A.); Isabel Fitton the viola pupil (VI, Ysobel); Arthur Troyte Griffith the Malvern architect-friend (VII, Troyte); Winifred Norbury the Sherridge family hostess (VIII, W.N.); and the publisher's editor A. J. Jaeger, the German Jäger (hunter), at Novello's in London who has been Elgar's professional supporter since 1896 (IX, Nimrod).

He thinks, by his own later letter to Jaeger: the theme is, in the aesthetic principle, a portrait-form. The theme runs through fourteen variations; each variation is a portrait of one of the circle.

He thinks, on the Nimrod: Jaeger has, in the letters of the past two years, taken the slow movement of the Sketches Op. 35 and pushed me to keep working on it when I wanted to stop. Jaeger has done the work for me that the Beethoven slow-movements do in the composer's own private listening. Jaeger is the Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord. The Variation IX has to be in the form of the Adagio movement of Beethoven's Op. 13, the Pathétique. The form is the form Jaeger and I have been arguing about in the letters.

He writes the manuscript of the fourteen variations through the autumn and winter of 1898 and into the spring of 1899. The score is sent to Novello's at the end of February 1899. The premiere is at St James's Hall in central London on the nineteenth of June 1899, conducted by Hans Richter (the Wagnerian conductor of the 1890s, who had come over from Vienna for the engagement). The reception of the premiere is, by the report of The Times the next morning, the most remarkable piece of English orchestral writing of the present generation. Elgar's reputation, on the back of the premiere, moved within a year from provincial to national. His First Symphony (1908), The Dream of Gerontius (1900), the Second Symphony (1911) and the late chamber music (the Cello Concerto, 1919) followed in the next two decades.

Variation IX, Nimrod is, by every careful judgment of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century English-music reception, the pre-eminent piece of English-orchestral elegy. It has been played at every state funeral in the United Kingdom since the funeral of George V in 1936 (the first state funeral after Elgar's own death in 1934). It is the piece played at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday every November. It is the piece at the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall. The eight-minute piece is, on every Remembrance Sunday from 1920 onward, played to a UK audience of, by the BBC's audit, about twelve to fifteen million viewers. Elgar himself, in a 1929 BBC interview with Sir Henry Wood (the founder of the Proms), said of Nimrod: the soul of the variation is in that one bar where the pedal-note holds the E flat against the rising motif of the upper voice. That bar is the soul of A. J. Jaeger and the soul, by extension, of every long friendship in this country. The Enigma of the title remains, to this day, formally unresolved: Elgar himself, in the 1929 Musical Times article, said that the Variations are the fourteen portraits, but that the theme itself is a counter-melody to a larger theme that is not played. Elgar refused to identify the larger theme throughout the remaining thirty-five years of his life. The candidates, by the musicological tradition, have been Auld Lang Syne, Rule Britannia, Pop Goes the Weasel, the Trio of the Eighth Symphony of Beethoven, and (in the Eric Sams hypothesis of 1970) the tune A New Way of Speaking. The 2009 PRS for Music investigation concluded, by the committee of musicologists, that the larger theme has not been definitively identified and that it is not known whether Elgar himself remembered, in his old age, what it had been.