Enigma Variations: Music with secret and cryptic messages

According to a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff, “a song sleeps in all things”. It is the task of poets and composers to awaken it. Some composers, however, did exactly the opposite and hid extra-musical secrets in their compositions. Such a secret “slept” particularly deeply and for a long time in Alban Berg’s 1926 Lyric Suite. Since the strictly twelve-tone work fulfils all the requirements of absolute instrumental music, it was only the discovery of an annotated pocket score in the 1970s that revealed the hidden programme: Berg had written the account of a secret love affair with the help of ingenious numerical relationships, the symbolism of tonal letters and thematic quotations from Richard Wagner and Alexander von Zemlinsky.

While Béla Bartók’s First Violin Concerto and Gustav Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony were also inspired by the love pangs of their authors, and Antonín Dvořák commemorated his deceased sister-in-law in his Cello Concerto, the secretive character in Dmitri Shostakovich’s music had political reasons: according to a remark by the composer, the second movement of his Tenth Symphony depicts a cruel portrait of Stalin. In addition, the DSCH motif consisting of the notes D C B E♭ plays a central role as a cipher of the composer’s name.

Finally, Robert Schumann did not need a reason to incorporate musical secrets; he loved them for their own sake. Among the numerous hidden messages to his future wife Clara is the ending of his Second Symphony, which quotes Beethoven’s song “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder” addressed to his “immortal beloved”.

Edward Elgar presents a particular puzzle in his Enigma Variations: 14 musical portraits of relatives and friends. Since Elgar himself gave hints as to who the intended persons were, this is not the actual puzzle of the work. Rather, “another, larger theme ʻgoesʼ, but is not played”, as the composer cryptically put it – and in doing so presented music researchers all over the world with an extremely perplexing challenge.