The Enigma Variations

A national music is rarely founded in a concert hall. More often it is founded in a private room at the end of a working day, when a tired man sits at a familiar keyboard with no thought of posterity, and a phrase escapes him that he does not at first recognise as his own.

THE PROVINCIAL

Edward William Elgar, forty-one in the autumn of 1898, was the son of a piano-tuner from Broadheath outside Worcester, schooled at Littleton House, sent to a solicitor's office at fifteen and back to music within the year. He was self-taught. He had been organist at St George's Roman Catholic Church in Worcester since 1885, was married nine years to Caroline Alice Roberts of Redmarley d'Abitot, kept a daughter of eight named Carice, and earned his living by violin lessons at Malvern Girls' College and on the private pupil circuit of the Malvern hills. His name was known in the provincial choral festivals; in London it carried no weight. A Catholic in an Anglican country, a tradesman's son in a profession dominated by gentlemen, a Midlander where music meant Leipzig or the Royal College, he had built his reputation slowly, by the only means available to him, which was patience and the daily teaching round.

THE EVENING AT FORLI

Saturday the twenty-first of October 1898. The Elgars' house, Forli, on the Alexandra Road at Malvern Wells, stood with its bay window facing south across the valley toward the Severn. He had come home from a day's teaching. Twenty past nine; Carice in bed; Alice on the sofa with her knitting. He lit a cigar, sat down at the Broadwood upright of 1885, and let his hands move over the keys without intention. The room smelt of tobacco and lamp oil. Outside, the hills were already invisible. He played a phrase in G minor, six bars, with a counter-line rising and falling in the bass, and went on, half-listening, to something else.

THE GAME

Alice looked up. That's nice, she said, by his own account in the December letter to Jaeger. No, he answered, it's just a tune I'm playing. Yes, but it's nice. Play it again. He played it again. Then she said the thing that opened the door: now imagine my friend Hew Steuart-Powell playing it. How would he play it? He sat for a moment with the phrase in his hands. Steuart-Powell was the amateur pianist of their chamber evenings, a man who fingered scales obsessively before any piece of work; the joke was that he could not begin without the warm-up. Elgar played the theme in Steuart-Powell's manner, the prefatory toccata folded into the melody itself, and Alice laughed. Now imagine Richard Baxter Townshend playing it. He played it as the Malvern eccentric would, with the tricycle-bell abruptness of the man. Then William Meath Baker, the squire of Hasfield, brisk and door-slamming; then Townshend's brother Richard Penrose Arnold; then Isabel Fitton the viola pupil, awkward at the string-crossing in a way the music could imitate; then Troyte Griffith the architect, who could never keep time; then Winifred Norbury of Sherridge, with her measured laugh. Each portrait sat exactly where the original phrase had been. And it occurred to him, somewhere between the fourth and the fifth, that this was not a game.

A SECOND OF TIME IN A DRAWING-ROOM

He stopped. The cigar was burning untouched on the saucer beside the music-rest. The room was the room he had played in every evening for years, but the phrase in his hands was something he had never made before; or had been making for twenty years without knowing. The whole apprenticeship in the provinces, the choral festivals at Worcester and Hereford, the violin pupils, the small-organ recitals, the church anthems written for fees of a guinea: all of it had been preparation for an idea he had not yet had a name for. The idea was that a man could be portrayed in music as accurately as in oil; that affection was a structural principle; that the friends of an ordinary Worcestershire life, taken together, made a form. I have sketched, he wrote to Jaeger within days, a set of Variations on an original theme: the Variations have amused me because I've labelled 'em with the nicknames of my particular friends; that is to say I've written the variations each one to represent the mood of the 'party'. The phrase he had played by accident was, he saw, a portrait of the player; the variations were the circle that had made the player possible. In the silence between the sixth bar and Alice's voice, the provincial composer became, without yet knowing it, a national one. Through the bay window, the dark over the valley toward the Severn was no different from the dark of any other Saturday in October. He picked up the pencil.

NIMROD

Through the winter of 1898 and the spring of 1899 he worked at the score in the front room at Forli, in letters to A. J. Jaeger at Novello's in London, who had been his publishing editor and his nagging conscience since 1896. Jäger in German is hunter; Nimrod in Genesis is the mighty hunter before the Lord; the pun gave him the title for the ninth variation. He wrote it in the form of the Adagio of Beethoven's Pathétique sonata, the form he and Jaeger had argued over in their correspondence about the Op. 35 sketches, where Jaeger had refused to let him abandon the slow movement. The pedal E flat in the lower voice holding against the rising motif above: the bar that any English child would later recognise without being told what it was. The score went to Novello's at the end of February. The premiere was at the St James's Hall in London on the nineteenth of June 1899, under Hans Richter, the Wagnerian over from Vienna. The Times the next morning called it the most remarkable piece of English orchestral writing of the present generation. Within twelve months Elgar's name in London had altered.

WHAT THE LARGER THEME WAS

He never said. In the Musical Times of 1929 he allowed only that the theme of the Variations was a counter-melody to a larger theme that is not played, and that the larger theme would have to be guessed. Auld Lang Syne was proposed; Rule Britannia; Pop Goes the Weasel; the Trio of Beethoven's Eighth; the tune A New Way of Speaking in Eric Sams's hypothesis of 1970. The PRS for Music committee of 2009 concluded that the question is not decidable from the evidence and may not have been decidable to Elgar himself in old age. He took it with him in 1934 to the grave at Little Malvern.

THE RETURN

The Dream of Gerontius followed in 1900, the First Symphony in 1908, the Second in 1911, the Cello Concerto in 1919. The provincial violin teacher of the Malvern hills became Sir Edward, Master of the King's Music, the first composer in two centuries whom an English public could name as their own. The Ninth Variation outgrew its book. From the funeral of George V in 1936 it was played at every British state funeral; from 1920 at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday; every November at the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall, to a listening country numbered by the BBC in tens of millions. It is the music a nation now uses when it does not know what else to say. Whatever the larger theme was, whether Auld Lang Syne or Rule Britannia or some private tune Elgar carried sealed to Little Malvern, the answer is the same: it is the unspoken thing that the played thing keeps faith with. A music sufficient to a country's grief is rarely composed by a man who set out to compose it. More often it begins on a Saturday evening at twenty past nine, in a drawing-room above a Worcestershire valley, when the cigar is lit and the upright piano stands open and a wife looks up from her knitting and says: play it again.