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

The cipher has 87 characters arranged in 3 lines. It uses 24 different symbols, each made of 1, 2, or 3 semicircles. The semicircles face one of 8 directions, though some symbols are unclear in 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 Dora. After this, Reverend Penny worked as a missionary in Melanesia for many years. In 1895, Reverend Penny remarried. Dora’s stepmother was a friend of Caroline Alice Elgar, who was the wife of composer 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 in his 40s 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. In his 1899 musical work Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma), Edward named Variation 10 “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 secret writing to the letter, writing “Miss Penny” on the back. This note was stored in a drawer for forty years. It became widely known when Dora included a copy of it in her 1937 memoir Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation, published by Methuen Publishing. The original note was later lost. Dora said she never read the note, believing it to 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 the local language and culture and owned some traditional items decorated 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 secret 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 kind of symbols. In April 1886 (over ten years before writing to Dora), Edward Elgar wrote 18 similar symbols followed by an underscore on a concert program. This became known as the “Liszt fragment.” The same symbols also appear in a notebook from the 1920s, along with diagrams that look like clock faces. They are also found on the so-called “Cryptogram card,” which is part of a set of cards showing Edward Elgar’s solution to a puzzle published in Pall Mall magazine in 1896.

Proposed solutions

Eric Sams, a musicologist, created an explanation in 1970. His interpretation of the message is:

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 87 or 88 characters. Sams argued that the extra letters are suggested by shortened forms of sounds.

Javier Atance proposed that the solution is not a text but a melody. He believed the 8 positions of semicircles turning clockwise match the notes of a scale, and each semicircle has 3 levels that represent natural, flat, or sharp notes.

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

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, said he found the correct message encoded as a simple substitution cipher (with two letters as nulls). Some details still need to be confirmed. His solution would read:

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 claimed in the journal Musical Opinion to have fully decrypted the message:

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 note from Sir Edward to the person who solved his cipher. Packwood’s method involved rearranging the cipher based on the position of dots, which he thought represented a conductor’s baton, and then changing the values of each symbol until a message appeared. The logic behind these changes was not explained.

In a 2023 study, Viktor Wase used computer programs to solve ciphers and found that the Dorabella cipher is unlikely to be a monoalphabetic substitution cipher in English or Latin. This was shown by testing algorithms that can solve short ciphers but failed to solve the Dorabella cipher.

2007 Elgar Society Competition

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