The Dorabella Cipher is a secret message written by composer Edward Elgar to Dora Penny. It came with a regular letter dated July 14, 1897. Penny could not solve the message, and its meaning is still unknown.

The cipher has 87 characters arranged over 3 lines. It uses 24 symbols, each made of 1, 2, or 3 curved lines pointing in one of 8 directions. Some symbols are unclear in their direction. A small dot appears after the fifth character on the third line.

Background

Dora Penny (1874–1964) was the daughter of Reverend Alfred Penny (1845–1935) from Wolverhampton. Dora’s mother died in February 1874, six days after giving birth to her. After this, Reverend Penny worked for many years as a missionary in Melanesia. In 1895, Reverend Penny remarried. Dora’s stepmother was a friend of Caroline Alice Elgar, who was the wife of Edward Elgar. In July 1897, the Penny family invited Edward and Alice Elgar to visit the Wolverhampton Rectory for several days.

Edward Elgar was a music teacher who had not yet become a famous composer. Dora Penny was nearly seventeen years younger than Edward. Edward and Dora became friends and remained close for the rest of Edward’s life. Edward named Variation 10 of his 1899 work, Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma), Dorabella as a tribute to Dora Penny.

After returning to Great Malvern on July 14, 1897, Alice Elgar wrote a letter thanking the Penny family. Edward Elgar added a note with unclear writing to the letter, writing “Miss Penny” on the back. This note was kept in a drawer for forty years. It became well known when Dora included a copy of it in her book Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation, published in 1937 by Methuen Publishing. Later, the original note was lost. Dora said she could not read the note and believed it might be a secret message.

Composer and historian Kevin Jones suggested one possibility:
Reverend Penny had recently returned from Melanesia, where he had worked as a missionary for many years. He was interested in local languages and cultures and owned some traditional items with mysterious symbols. Perhaps one of these items was discussed during the Elgars’ visit to Wolverhampton. If Dora remembered this later, it might explain why she described the coded message as an “inscription” when she wrote to the director of SOAS many years later.

The Dorabella Cipher is not the only document with the same curved symbols. In April 1886 (over ten years before writing to Dora), Edward Elgar wrote 18 similar symbols and an underscore on a concert program. This became known as the “Liszt fragment.” The symbols also appear in a notebook from the 1920s, along with drawings that look like clock faces, and on a card called the “Cryptogram card.” This card is part of a set of cards that show how Edward Elgar solved a puzzle in Pall Mall magazine in 1896.

Proposed solutions

Eric Sams, a musicologist, created an interpretation in 1970. He explained the message as:

STARTS: LARKS! IT'S CHAOTIC, BUT A CLOAK OBSCURES MY NEW LETTERS, A, B [alpha, beta, i.e., Greek letters or alphabet] BELOW: I OWN THE DARK MAKES E. E. SIGH WHEN YOU ARE TOO LONG GONE.

This text has 109 letters (excluding the note about Greek letters), while the original message has only 87 or 88 characters. Sams argued that the extra letters are implied by phonetic shorthand.

Javier Atance proposed that the solution is not a text but a melody. He suggested that the 8 different positions of the semicircles, turning clockwise, correspond to the notes of a scale. Each semicircle has 3 levels, representing natural, flat, or sharp notes.

Tim S. Roberts claimed the solution uses a simple substitution cipher and provided statistical reasoning:

P.S. Now droop beige weeds set in it – pure idiocy – one entire bed! Luigi Ccibunud luv’ngly tuned liuto studo two.

In December 2011, Richard Henderson, a Canadian cryptographer, claimed to have found the correct message encoded as a simple substitution cipher (with two letters as nulls). Some details remain unclear. His solution reads:

whY AM I VERY SAD, BELLE. I SAG AS WE SEE ROSES DO. E.E. IS EVER FOND OF U, DORA. I kNOw I PeN ONE I LOVe. All Of My Affection.

In July 2020, Wayne Packwood published a complete decryption in the journal Musical Opinion:

A WOMAN IS LIKE CHESS ONE HAS TO MAKE MANY SACRIFICES FOR ITS QUEEN IT IS VICTORY SHE COMMANDS NOT DO BETTER

The secondary message, identified as the word "RATS," was believed by Packwood to be a playful acknowledgment from Sir Edward to the person who broke his cipher. Packwood’s method involved rearranging the cipher based on the position of dots, which he linked to a conductor’s baton. He then shifted the values of each symbol until a message appeared. The reasoning behind the pattern of shifts is not explained.

In a 2023 study, Viktor Wase used computer algorithms to analyze the Dorabella cipher. He concluded it is unlikely to be a monoalphabetic substitution cipher in English or Latin. This was determined by showing that such algorithms can solve shorter ciphers but fail to solve the Dorabella cipher.

2007 Elgar Society Competition

In 2007, the Elgar Society announced a Dorabella Cipher Competition to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Elgar's birth. Many entries were received, but none were considered successful. Some submissions included thorough and creative analysis. However, these attempts often resulted in random letter sequences. The outcomes appeared as nonsensical phrases, similar to what might be created from any group of unrelated letters.