Harper Scott reiterates that opinion more flamboyantly, “Although human nature guarantees that attempts to solve it will never end until the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail are on permanent display at the British Museum…the riddle cannot be answered now its perpetrator is dead…” With few exceptions the scholarly consensus maintains the correct melodic solution is impossible to discover or authenticate because Elgar presumably took his secret to the grave without leaving behind some viable form of confirmation. The elusive melody to Elgar’s Enigma Variations has been the subject of endless speculation, prompting prominent scholars like the late Michael Kennedy to profess, “People have ingeniously been trying to guess the tune ever since, a harmless but pointless recreation since the secret, if there was one, died with him.” J. Contradistinctive to the claims of prominent scholars who insist he took his secret to the grade, Elgar authenticates Ein feste Burg as the correct melodic solution using a musical Polybius Square Cipher embedded in the opening six bars of the Enigma Theme. The only Theme ever shown to successfully satisfy all six of Elgar’s specific conditions is Ein feste Burg. Contrary to customary expectations, Ein feste Burg plays over the complete Enigma Theme in retrograde, a perplexing feature consistent with the Theme’s enigmatic title. No other Theme has ever been previously shown to play over any of the Variations or the complete Enigma Theme.
Mapping Mendelssohn’s adaption of that hymn through and over Variation IX Nimrod produces a credible contrapuntal and horizontal fit, complying with Elgar’s condition that requires the covert Theme must play “through and over” the set of Variations. Multiple cryptograms in the Variations serve to authenticate Ein feste Burg as the covert Theme. 107, Ein feste Burg (A Mighty Fortress) by Martin Luther. Four anomalous Mendelssohn fragments quoted in Variation XIII implicate a famous melody cited in the fourth movement of the Reformation Symphony Op. The failure to carefully define those conditions largely accounts for a panoply of discordant melodic solutions. The goal of identifying and authenticating the covert Theme to the Enigma Variations requires a comprehensive restatement of six conditions issued by Edward Elgar between 18 that must be met by the absent melody.
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