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Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36, Enigma Variations Edward Elgar
(1857 — 1934)

Sir Edward Elgar was the man whose splendid work finally lay to rest the belief that England was
somehow an unmusical country. He was the son of an organist who provided him with most of his
musical education; he, too, became a talented organist and an orchestral violinist, but he initially
found his youthful ambitions to be both performer and composer difficult to achieve. His earliest
professional engagements were as music teacher at a school for the blind and then as conductor
of an orchestra of mental hospital patients, but from these beginnings, he evolved into the masterful
composer. He became the very model of the Edwardian artist-gentleman, and in 1904, the Queen of
England knighted him.
Elgar completed Enigma Variations on February 19, 1899; it was premiered on June 19th, under the
direction of the great Wagnerian conductor, Hans Richter. After the first performance, Richter and
one of the composer’s friends suggested some changes in the orchestration and in the ending. Elgar
conducted a revised version at a concert of the Worcester Festival on September 13, 1899.
Enigma Variations became Elgar’s first major work as well as the first large orchestral piece by a
British composer. The idea for the Variations occurred to him one day while he was improvising at
the piano: the opening subject, the “theme,” was to be called “Enigma,” and at the start of each of
the fourteen variations, initials or some other kind of reference to a member of Elgar’s circle would
appear. The composer’s inscription dedicates the work “to my friends pictured within.”

In the program note Elgar wrote for the premiere, he said, “It is true that I have sketched, for their
amusement and mine, the idiosyncrasies of fourteen of my friends, not necessarily musicians; but this
is a personal matter and need not have been mentioned publicly. The Variations should stand simply
as a ‘piece’ of music. The ‘Enigma’ I will not explain—its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed, and I
warn you that the apparent connection between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest
texture.
The composition begins with the theme, Enigma, which Elgar never explained. The first variation,
C.A.E., Andante, is a portrait of the composer’s wife, his “romantic inspiration,” he said. Her name
was C. Alice Elgar. Elgar said that here he “prolonged’ the “theme with what I wished to be romantic
and delicate additions.”
The second variation, H.D.S-P. Allegro, portrays H.D. Stuart Powell, an amateur pianist who used to
play trios with the composer, and who always exercised his fingers before beginning to play a piece.
“His characteristic diatonic run over the keys before beginning to play is here humorously travestied
in the semiquaver passages; these should suggest a Toccata, but chromatic beyond H.D.S-P.’s liking.”
The third variation, R.B.T. Allegretto, a caricature of Richard Baxter Townshend, an amateur actor
whose vocal tricks are echoed by the oboe and bassoon, Elgar said refers to “R.B.T.’s presentation of
an old man in some amateur theatricals – the low voice flying off occasionally into ‘soprano’ timbre.”

The fourth variation, W.M.B., Allegro di molto, has as its subject a Gloucester squire, William Meath
Baker. The big closing chord recalls his habit of slamming the door on leaving a room. “The Variation
was written after the host had, with a slip of paper in his hand, forcibly read out the arrangements for
the day and hurriedly left the music-room with an inadvertent bang of the door. . .. [There] are some
suggestions of the teasing attitude of the guests.”

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