The Dorabella Cipher, Edward Elgar's unsolved note

In July 1897 the English composer Edward Elgar sent a note to a young friend, Dora Penny. The message contained no words, but three lines of small semicircular signs, carefully drawn. Dora was never able to read it, and no one after her has done so with certainty. It is known as the Dorabella Cipher, after the affectionate nickname Elgar gave her and by which music lovers still remember her today.

A note between friends

Dora Penny was a visitor to the home of Elgar and his wife Alice, with whom the Penny family were on friendly terms. The composer loved wordplay, riddles and cryptograms, and often gave them to his closest friends. The note, dated 14 July 1897, was sent to Dora after a visit the couple had paid to her family in Wolverhampton, and accompanied a letter of thanks for the hospitality received.

Two years later, in 1899, Elgar composed the Enigma Variations, a series of musical portraits of friends and family. The tenth variation, entitled 'Dorabella', is dedicated to Dora herself, portrayed with a light, hesitant rhythm which, according to tradition, imitates her slight stammer. The link between the coded note and Elgar's taste for riddles is therefore clear.

Eighty-seven signs

The cipher consists of 87 characters arranged in three lines. Each character is made of one, two or three small arcs, facing in eight different directions. The system therefore offers twenty-four possible combinations, a number very close to that of the letters of the English alphabet, and for this reason many believe it is a simple substitution of letters with symbols.

Elgar himself had noted in a notebook a cipher system based on similar arcs, matched to the letters of the alphabet. Applying that system to the note, however, does not yield an intelligible text. Perhaps the message contains abbreviations, mistakes, private jokes or phonetically spelled words, or it follows rules different from those in the notebook.

The interpretations

Many solutions have been proposed: affectionate phrases, references to everyday life, even an encoded melody. None has convinced most scholars, because each requires arbitrary adjustments. The text is short, and with so few characters it is easy to find readings that are plausible but impossible to prove, a problem common to many small ciphers.

Dora Penny published the cipher in her memoirs, which appeared in 1937 under her married name, Mrs Richard Powell. She stated that she had never deciphered it. Elgar himself, who died in 1934, is not known ever to have revealed its content, to her or to anyone else, and his papers contain no explicit solution.

The Dorabella note is perhaps the smallest of the great cryptographic puzzles. Its appeal lies in the contrast between the lightness of the occasion, a playful message between friends, and the tenacity with which for more than a century it has resisted mathematicians, musicologists and enthusiasts. Perhaps the secret was meant for a single reader, and was lost with her.