Bob Padgett used to work for large insurance companies in northern California, assessing property damage from fires and floods. But he was also a talented classical violinist, and he would moonlight for different orchestras, which is how he came to plumb a century-old mystery called the Enigma.

In 2006, Padgett was part of an orchestra preparing for a concert dedicated to the “mysteries and hidden messages” of Edward Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme, Enigma, Op. 36. The Enigma Variations, as it is commonly called, is one of Britain’s most beloved classical music works. Written between 1898 and 1899, it features 14 variations, one of which has become a kind of British national elegy, played at Princess Diana’s funeral and performed annually at the country’s Remembrance Sunday ceremony for fallen soldiers.

When the Enigma Variations debuted in London in 1899, Elgar wrote a mysterious note in the playbill:



The Enigma I will not explain – its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the connexion between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes’, but is not played …. So the principal Theme never appears, even as in some late dramas (…) the chief character is never on the stage.﻿

So what is that enigmatic theme that supposedly runs through the entire work but is never played? Elgar, who died in 1934, never said. It has been understood to be a well-known melody that would harmonize with the music if played along with it. For decades, musicologists, cryptologists and music lovers have offered up innumerable solutions for the phantom melody. In 1953, the Saturday Review magazine hosted a guessing contest, eliciting suggestions including a trio from Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte and a movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata. In 1960, English musicologist J. A. Westrup said it could be connected to a passage from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. In 1970, British musicologist and cryptologist Eric Sams argued that Auld Lang Syne fit all 14 variations, even though Elgar himself had rejected that solution. In 1984, master violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin announced from the stage at Carnegie Hall before conducting the Enigma Variations that the solution was Rule Brittania. In 1991, the Sunday Telegraph and the New York Times published British pianist Joseph Cooper’s solution: part of the second movement of Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony, a theory endorsed by leading Elgar expert Jerrold Northrop Moore. In 2007, the 150th anniversary of Elgar’s birth, University of Leeds music professor Clive McClelland offered up a solution to the Enigma: the 19th-century hymn “Now the Day is Over.” “I suddenly came up with the first few notes of a promising tune in bed at 4 a.m.,” McClelland said in a press release. “It was a genuine ‘Eureka!’ moment!”

And far from the ivory towers of music academia, mostly on his blog, Elgar’s Enigma Theme Unmasked, Bob Padgett has emerged as perhaps the most prolific and dogged of all Enigma seekers. His solution, which has caught the attention of classical music scholars, lies at the bottom of a rabbit hole of anagrams, cryptography, the poet Longfellow, the composer Mendelssohn, the Shroud of Turin, and Jesus, all of which he believes he found hiding in plain sight in the music.

