THE RETURN OF THE DOVE TO THE ARK ‘Enigma ’ Variations a Century on

The announcement of a new creative presence on the world stage has never been made more brilliantly or completely than by Elgar’s ‘Enigma ’ Variations, a hundred years ago. The Variations announced a mature new presence- deftly and graciously acknowledging its roots in the private experience of the man himself, and at the same time anticipating in an extraordinary way the career that was to unfold over the next twenty years. In these ways Elgar’s Variations, I suggest to you, was and still is without a parallel anywhere in music. Elgar’s private strength- a primary source of his power over those who love his music (as well, perhaps, as over those who used fashionably to hate it)- lies in his strange ability to look both backwards and forwards at once. That is, when you think about it, an essence of musical form, as an art in time. But Elgar’s music has this strange way of bringing together the Ghost of Christmas Past with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, as the two faces of a Janus. Elgar’s Janus, as it emerges in the Variations, shows in one face the human being his friends knew (or hoped they knew). The other face reveals, as I think, his creative aspiration. It is that face, seldom looked at in the context of the Variations, that I would like to scrutinise with you today. This means going right outside all notions of the ‘Enigma ’ as a riddle to solve. It means entertaining th