Date of composition: 1898-1899
Premiere: 19 June 1899 in St. James's Hall, London, conductor: Hans Richter
Duration: 29 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
First performed on 3 February 1908 conducted by Arthur Nikisch
With his Enigma Variations, Edward Elgar, then already 42 years old, achieved his breakthrough as a composer in 1899 – far beyond Great Britain. In continental Europe, it may have helped that the famous Hans Richter, the conductor of the world premiere, bestowed on the work his seal of approval. Thus, the autodidact from a Catholic family, the penniless son of a music dealer who had painstakingly earned his living in the provinces as a violin teacher and choral conductor, was finally recognised as one of the great figures of his time.
In fact, the work’s title is disarmingly straightforward: “Variations on an Original Theme”, “dedicated to my friends pictured within”. In this spirit, Elgar announced the piece to his publisher August Jaeger: “the Variations have amused me because I've labelled 'em with the nicknames of my particular friends” – thus Jaeger himself appeared as the Old Testament king Nimrod.
Only three months after completing the score did Elgar mention the term “Enigma” (mystery or riddle), which is attached to the Andante theme – though not to the work as a whole. What it referred to, however, he left open: “its ’dark saying’ must be left unguessed”. As if that were not enough, he pointed out that “through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes’, but is not played” – a secret counterpoint that to this day has never been fully deciphered.
The movements that follow the Andante form a kind of musical self-portrait of the composer reflected in his friends. His wife Alice is among them: she supported Elgar energetically in artistic as well as practical matters, and she is honoured in the First Variation. Many numbers are based on the quirks of their subjects or humorous incidents involving them – for instance a friend’s “curiously rasping voice” (Variation 3), the swaggering gesture of a noisy country squire (4), a viola pupil (6), the rural idyll at the home of the music patron Winifred Norbury (8), the “dance-like lightness” of Dora Penny, known as Dorabella (10), or the lyricism of an amateur cellist (12).
Unmistakably, however, the Ninth Variation, dedicated to Jaeger, forms the emotional centre. In the intimate relationship with this friend, documented in many letters in rapturous tones, one may even find an unconscious reason for the “dark saying” of the main theme: Elgar, who through immense discipline rose from modest circumstances into London’s aristocratic circles, may have harboured unacknowledged homosexual longings – unspeakable in Victorian England. In the final variation (“E. D. U.”, titled after the shortened form of the Germanised version of his first name, by which Alice addressed him), Elgar sets up a shining monument to his contrapuntal mastery – and shortly before the pathos-laden, yet entirely fitting conclusion, he allows the Nimrod Variation to resound once more in solemn fashion: a hymn to friendship.