Breaking Elgar's enigmatic code
The cipher follows a simple pattern, with single,
double and triple E-like characters, each in eight possible orientations -
upright, rotated 45 degrees clockwise, 90 degrees clockwise and so on. This
gives a total of 24 potential characters, and as with many ciphers, I and J
share a single character, as do U and V. Samples on the page written using this
code reveal the messages M-A-R-C-O E-L-G-A-R (Marco was his pet spaniel) and A
V-E-R-Y O-L-D C-Y-P-H-E-R.
Breaking Elgar's enigmatic
code
25 December 2004
Kevin Jones is professor of music at
Kingston University, UK
IT IS a story with all the makings of a
blockbuster novel: a brilliant composer, an attractive woman, a secret letter
and a mystery that has lasted 100 years. This story, though, is real. The
composer was Edward Elgar, the renowned English musician who died 70 years ago.
The young women was Dora Penny, a family friend. And the mystery? A short coded
letter that, his music apart, remains one of Elgar's most enduring
legacies.
A study of the
composer's papers reveals that for most of his life he was fascinated by
cryptography. His letters and music scores, for example, are dotted with codes
and anagrams. And the title of his
Enigma
Variations, first performed in 1899,
hints at his delight in cryptic puzzles. He teasingly suggested that the melody
on which his variations are based forms a counterpoint or matching voice to a
well-known tune that is present in the piece only by implication. None of the
many suggestions as to what this tune might be, including
Auld Lang
Syne and
Rule
Britannia, ring true, so the enigma
remains.
Yet Elgar left another,
more intriguing, mystery. In 1896, while struggling to achieve recognition as a
composer, he met Dora Penny, a young woman 20 years his junior. The daughter of
a clergyman recently returned from Melanesia, she shared Elgar's interests in
kites, cycling and football (they both supported Wolverhampton Wanderers). They
exchanged letters and in July 1897, the halcyon summer of Queen Victoria's
golden jubilee, Elgar sent her a letter in code. Its curious symbols, possibly
inspired by Arabic script, seem to be based on the double-arched, cursive E in
Elgar's signature (see page 58). Now known as the Dorabella cipher, after his
nickname for Dora Penny, it remains unbroken. It has proved one of
cryptography's most enduring
puzzles.
It is not surprising
that Elgar was fascinated by ciphers. Code-breaking techniques have notable
similarities to the process of composing formal harmony and counterpoint. Both
activities involve sifting, shuffling and transposing parallel sequences of code
or notes to find the best fit. For musicians, the challenge is to devise lines
of music that sound pleasing on their own and also sound harmonious when played
together. Take the round
Frère
Jacques, for instance. This is a simple
example of repeated patterns of notes that overlap with each other. In a more
complex manifestation it becomes a fugue. Experienced composers, like
code-breakers, build up a repertoire of templates and patterns that can be
tested and modified to
suit.
Links between music and
ciphers go back centuries. One of the earliest known treatises on cryptography
was written by Al-Kindi, an accomplished musician who was one of a group of
Baghdad scholars working in the 9th century during the golden age of Islamic
scholarship. Al-Kindi devised a revolutionary system for breaking substitution
ciphers - messages encrypted by replacing, say, A with
P,
B with
Q,
and so on - based on an analysis of letter
frequencies.
Scholars had
noticed that in the Koran, certain letters appeared with greater frequency than
others, and they compiled a chart that ranked letters from most to least
frequent. Al-Kindi realised he could use this chart to help crack substitution
ciphers by replacing the most commonly used character in the ciphered text with
the most common letter in Arabic, and then working through the chart to the
least
frequent.
“Known as
the Dorabella cipher, Elgar's code is one of cryptography's most enduring
puzzles”
Aware of this
weakness, the Italian composer and architect Leon Alberti revolutionised
cryptography in the 15th century with the invention of the cipher wheel. This is
a rotating disc set within another disc, each with an alphabet inscribed around
its rim. Match, say, A on one disc with
C
on the other and it becomes easy to create coded messages. Better still, it is
simple to reset the position of the wheels at intervals to eliminate frequency
patterns. This, Alberti thought, would make messages coded with his wheel
impossible to break unless the settings were known. An electronic version of
this device with multiple discs lay at the heart of the Enigma machine, a German
cipher device used in the second world war and named after Elgar's variations by
its German inventor, Arthur
Scherbius.
Cryptographers have
also co-opted musical notation into their service. Everyone from 16th-century
spies to illegal gamblers in 1950s New York have sent messages disguised as
music. A typical cipher from the 18th century matches the first 12 letters of
the alphabet to an ascending scale of
12
crotchets or quarter notes, and the next 12 letters to a descending scale of 12
quavers or eighth
notes.
Musicians, too, seem to
enjoy adopting simple codes when composing melodies. Many pieces of music
contain motifs based on initials, words or short phrases written using the seven
musical notes A to G. German musical notation also allows the addition of S and
H - equivalent to E-flat and B. The musical cipher B-A-C-H is common, and both
the BBC and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich have used their initials as coded
musical signatures. However, note-based codes can be used for more than just
adding labels: Robert Schumann and Alban Berg both used short coded motifs in
their compositions as references to illicit love affairs, and in the early 19th
century John Field, the celebrated Irish composer of nocturnes, thanked some
particularly generous dinner hosts with melodies based on B-E-E-F and
C-A-B-B-A-G-E. Elgar made use of this technique too. In 1885 he composed a duet
for two sisters based on their family name G-E-D-G-E, and 15 years later he
mischievously ciphered the names of some of his critics into the demon's chorus
in his oratorio The Dream of
Gerontius.
It
is also possible to create a cipher using musical rhythm. Morse code has obvious
potential. The Australian-born composer Barrington Pheloung used conspicuous
Morse code rhythm patterns in his music for the UK television series
Inspector
Morse, and even encoded the murderer's
identity into the incidental music for some
episodes.
It is known that Elgar
attempted to learn Morse code and it is possible that he used it in his music.
For example, it could explain his
Enigma
theme, which has a distinctive rhythmic structure that suggests calculated
design: the first motif is followed by itself reversed, forming a rhythmic
palindrome: two short notes, two long notes; two long notes, two short notes.
This pattern is repeated three times in
total.
Its symmetry is striking,
a feature that would do credit to a 20th-century modernist but it is odd for its
time. So what might this pattern
represent?
In Morse code two
dots represents I and two dashes M. So the motif could be read as a repetition
of "I am, am I?" This accords with Elgar's admission that the theme represented
the sense of loneliness and inadequacy he felt at the time he wrote it, and the
observations by others that Elgar had been deeply hurt by cruel put-downs from
critics. It suggests a heartfelt but defiant
response.
Morse code may also
crop up in a cryptic letter that Elgar sent to Dora in 1901. Within the message
he inserts short, distinctive motifs from his
Enigma
Variations, in particular a fragment
from the Dorabella variation and the opening of the initial theme. The segment
reads: "Whether you are as nice as", three short notes, three short notes, "or
only as unideal as", two short notes, two long notes. Interpreted as Morse code,
these mysterious notes become SS and IM, inviting the interpretation: "Whether
you are as nice as sugar and spice or only as unideal as I
am".
What clues do we have to
the meaning of the Dorabella cipher itself? Analysis of the frequency
distribution of the characters in the message reveals a pattern typical of a
substitution cipher, but all attempts to break it based on this assumption have
failed. Writing in the journal
The Musical
Times in February 1970, cryptographer
and musicologist Eric Sams analysed the cipher for telltale patterns of letter
groups, such as sequences of the form xyyx that have a limited number of
possible vowel-consonant equivalents (S-E-E-S, for instance) and which could
offer clues to the cipher. Sams did not get very far, however, and his results
are
unconvincing.
“Elger
mischievously ciphered the names of some of his critics into the demon's
chorus”
Elgar appears to
have offered the key in an exercise book containing the address "Tiddington
House", where he lived from 1927. He listed the symbols used in the Dorabella
cipher matched against the letters of the alphabet. The cipher follows a simple
pattern, with single, double and triple E-like characters, each in eight
possible orientations - upright, rotated 45 degrees clockwise, 90 degrees
clockwise and so on. This gives a total of 24 potential characters, and as with
many ciphers, I and J share a single character, as do U and V. Samples on the
page written using this code reveal the messages M-A-R-C-O E-L-G-A-R (Marco was
his pet spaniel) and A V-E-R-Y O-L-D C-Y-P-H-E-R. But when applied to the
Dorabella cipher this key does not generate anything that makes obvious
sense.
Since simple substitution
fails, it seems likely that Elgar used a form of double-encipherment, such as
letter substitution followed by letter shuffling, perhaps coding the message in
alternate letters (for example, the 1st, 3rd, 5th and so on). But the appearance
of a repeated four-letter group makes letter shuffling
unlikely.
This does not rule out
the use of multiple substitution alphabets using a keyword, however, a sort of
manual version of the Alberti cipher wheel. If the keyword is D-O-G, for
example, you might carry out letter substitution by first coding A as D, B as E
and so on, then coding A as O, B as P and so on, finally coding A as G, B as H
and so on.
The detective work is
complicated by Elgar's eccentric spelling. For instance, he once wrote of Dora
Penny "warbling wigorously in Worcester wunce a week". And what appears to be a
potential cipher message in the Tiddington House exercise book reads: "DO YOU GO
TO LONDON TOMORROW?" A message lacking E, the most frequently used letter in
English, seems deliberately designed to confuse. Elgar even put a small mark
below each letter O, perhaps hinting that they might be dropped from the message
altogether.
Did he use these
kinds of tricks in the Dorabella cipher? It seems likely. Seventy years after
his death, Elgar's most intriguing composition is yet to be
cracked.
From issue 2479 of New
Scientist magazine, 25 December 2004, page 56
Posted: Thu - May 26, 2005 at 08:04 PM
