In “R.B.T.,” Elgar uses woodwinds to mimic Richard Baxter Townshend’s ability to break into falsetto in “W.M.B.,” brass and timpani paint the forceful personality of William M. Stuart-Powell’s enthusiastic piano exercises. The warm lyricism of the first variation represents the composer’s wife, followed by skittering passages in the second depicting H.D. Many of Elgar’s subjects were musicians, and the set reveals the composer’s sense not only of their individual personalities but of the underlying relationship between personality and musical expression. The resulting balance is more episodic than architectural, more theatrical than analytical. But herein lies another enigma of this work: the theme has an open-ended quality that simultaneously defies easy recognition and lends itself to ingenious permutations. Conventional wisdom is to begin with a theme that is compact and memorable. The trick to any set of variations is the delicate balance between repetition (so the listener retains an awareness of the musical idea) and variety (so the listener remains diverted). have written – if they were asses enough to compose – it’s a quaint idea & the result is amusing to those behind the scenes & won’t affect the hearer who ‘nose nuffin’.” Elgar’s lighthearted description is at odds with the weighty masterpiece that earned him a new measure of respect – a process he acknowledged later when he referred to the work as “commenced in a spirit of humor and continued in deep seriousness.” him (or her) self and have written what I think they wd. That is to say I’ve written the variations each one to represent the mood of the ‘party’ – I’ve liked to imagine the ‘party’ writing the var. Second, because he tagged each of the 14 variations with initials that referred to private nicknames.Įlgar explained his concept in a letter to August Jaeger (portrayed in Variation IX): “I have sketched a set of Variations (orkestra) on an original theme: the Variations have amused me because I’ve labeled ’em with the nicknames of my particular friends – you are Nimrod. The piece earned its moniker “Enigma” for two reasons: first, because the composer himself claimed that the original theme was combined with another theme in his mind – a kind of shadow musical character – whose identity he refused to reveal. Elgar’s 1899 Variations on an Original Theme provides the listener an opportunity to follow a musical idea through diverse transformations.

Elgar enigma variations