FREE ELGAR DOWNLOADS

From today we are offering four free Elgar downloads, courtesy of LSO Live, the award-winning record label of the London Symphony Orchestra

1 Nimrod, from the Enigma Variations
Arguably Elgar’s most famous piece of music, and now an indispensable part of Remembrance Day and most memorial services.

2 Praise to the Holiest in the Height
A choral highlight from Elgar’s greatest oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius – a soaring testament to his faith.

3 An extract from the Scherzo of the First Symphony
Acclaimed by the conductor Hans Richter as “the greatest symphony of modern times”.

4 An extract from the Larghetto of the Second Symphony
A complex work that is recognised as one of the composer’s most profound achievements.

MYSTERY INSIDE AN ENIGMA

If I could whisk myself back to the genesis of one musical masterpiece I would choose to be a fly on the wall of a Worcestershire cottage on the night of October 21, 1898, when a 41-year-old jobbing musician came home after teaching the violin. He sat down at the piano and began doodling. “That’s a good tune,” his wife said. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” the man said, improvising variations to portray various friends. “But something might be made of it.” Something was. Eight months later the tune, and the friends’ portraits, had grown into a full orchestral work, premiered as Variations on an Original Theme. But in the manuscript, underneath the title, the composer’s publisher (himself portrayed in the finest variation, Nimrod) had added the word “Enigma”.

It seems to have been an afterthought, probably added to pep up interest in an obscure composer. But it was as the Enigma Variations that the work swept the globe, bringing fame to its creator, Edward Elgar, and giving the musical world one of its most enduring mysteries.

What was the enigma? More ink has been used by musicologists, cryptologists and even psychologists attempting to answer that question than Elgar ever used in composing his first masterpiece. So on the eve of his 150th birthday, can we give a definitive solution?

The answer is no, for one good reason: Elgar ensured that the trail contained more red herrings than an Agatha Christie thriller. Even in his original programme note he did more to tantalise than clarify. “The Enigma I will not explain – its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed,” he wrote. What’s more, he continued, “through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes’, but is not played.”

So immediately there isn’t one enigma but two: the dark saying and the larger theme. That’s not all. As every Elgar fan knows, there is a third. When Elgar later identified the “friends pictured within”, he left the subject of the most haunting variation, No XIII, as “***”. Who is “***”? Is she the same as “. . . .”, whose soul Elgar said was “enshrined” in his Violin Concerto?

Attempts to identify the theme that “goes but is not played” began soon after the piece was unveiled. Many of Elgar’s friends thought it was Auld Lang Syne. The tune could (roughly) be counterpointed against what Elgar wrote, and the song’s subject, friendship, could credibly be seen as the “larger theme”.

Others thought the hidden theme was Rule, Britannia. Again, it fits musically – just. And Elgar had told one friend, Dora Penny, that she “of all people” ought to guess it. Why? Perhaps because of her surname. The old Victorian penny had an engraving of Britannia on its flipside.

After that the gates opened. The Agnus Dei from Bach’s B Minor Mass, Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata and Purcell’s When I am Laid in Earth were all proposed as themes. More recently the conductor Raymond Leppard detected an uncanny resemblance between the Enigma and the Benedictus from a Requiem by Elgar’s contemporary, Charles Villiers Stanford.

Another striking resemblance, with a passage in the slow movement of Mozart’s Prague Symphony,was pointed out by the pianist Joseph Cooper. That’s interesting, because diligent detective work has discovered that Elgar attended a performance of the Praguejust before the evening when he improvised the Variations. What’s more, when his work was premiered, the Prague was included in the concert.

Case proven? Hardly. How does the Prague, or any other tune, constitute a “dark saying”? It was to address this point that the musicologist Ian Parrott came up with a spectacular theory about the Enigma’s title. Did it perhaps refer to the famous biblical quotation from Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass darkly”? You see, if you go to the Latin translation of that epistle (which Elgar, as a practising Catholic, would have known), the phrase reads: “ Videmus nunc speculum in enigmate”. The passage extols faith, hope and (especially) love as the greatest virtues. At that lowly point in his career, Elgar may have felt grateful to friends who offered him all three.

By now you may feel you have wandered by mistake into The Da Vinci Code. But believe me, these are some of the more plausible attempts to solve Elgar’s enigma. And when we come to the elusive “***”, the theories are even wilder. The conventional answer is that the dedicatee of Variation XIII was Lady Mary Lygon, a local grandee who supported Elgar. She may have declined to be named out of aristocratic hauteur. But the variation contains an odd quotation from Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, as well as a passage of strangely agitated music. This has led some to suggest that the real subject was Elgar’s first sweetheart, Helen Weaver, who died tragically after a long sea voyage.

One thing’s clear. Elgar was resolved to take his secrets to the grave. To everyone who wrote to him with “solutions” to the Enigmahe sent an identical reply: “No: nothing like it. E. E.” So perhaps we should ease up on the code-breaking and just enjoy the music. After all, the one undeniable fact about the Enigmais that it was the best piece written by an Englishman for 200 years.

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