As you've probably noticed, Mottley is a big fan of Edward Elgar. In fact, he hears or plays some of Elgar's
music in nearly every story.
Elgar's most famous composition (after Pomp and Circumstance, of course) is Opus 36, known as the Enigma Variations.
Variation IX, called "Nimrod," appears in Mister Mottley Gets His Man when Mottley wins the confidence of the troubled Peggy Mabry:
The smile melted Peggy’s glare, along with her starched spine. She stretched her arms over her head and yawned. “What about your mother?” she demanded.
“She
understood everything about people and nothing about housekeeping. Always scattering hairpins behind her and smelling of jam.”
“Dead?” asked Peggy.
“Yonks ago.”
“My mother’s hairpins never came out. They wouldn’t dare,” Peggy said. “She wasn’t frightening at all, but everyone did as they were told. Even Papa. You just couldn’t imagine doing otherwise.”
Mottley sank down in the glossy leather seat. The spicy-sweet scent of a viburnum blooming behind the stable crept in. Mottley took
up his oboe and began to play. Elgar’s Nimrod swirled around them and floated up to the spiders in the rafters.
You may be familiar with the haunting tune of "Nimrod" from many movie scores. If not, you can
hear it on YouTube here.
Elgar composed the Enigma as a musical cryptogram, with each variation on the theme carrying a coded reference or portrait of one of his friends. But the composer said in his notes that "through and over the whole set another and larger theme 'goes', but is not played . . . So the principal Theme never
appears."
Fans and musicologists have tried for over a century to decode this melodic puzzle and identify the hidden "principal theme." And I heard a story on public radio this week that says someone may finally have done it.
Has the musical code finally been broken, or has the Enigma broken the musician? Listen to the story and decide for yourself.
