This chapter is a selective guide to published ‘solutions’ to ‘the enigma’. There are certainly more; some, indeed, that I know of have merited no more than a passing mention. Comprehensive treatment would fill a book and, since interest in the question shows no sign of abating, I expect to be out of date on publication. I shall propose no new solution, nor try to fathom the solvers' psychology, beyond remarking that it may lead to illnesses dangerous to scholars, such as selective quotation.

Some solutions separate, and some mingle, the positivistic and the interpretative. The first type tries to trace sources for the conception of the theme and the portraits of friends, basing interpretation on verifiable facts. The second is more concerned to find an inner meaning which may have formed no part of Elgar's thinking on the critical October weekend of 1898. Since the word ‘enigma’ was only added to the score a month or so before the first performance, ‘the enigma’ may have been a retrospective act of interpretation by the composer himself, followed up over the years in letters, interviews, annotations (including MFPW), and musical reminiscences, notably in The Music Makers. On the other hand, it is occasionally proposed that the ‘enigma’ was a joke.

It was certainly effective publicity. Unlike Potter (see p. 22), Elgar was not writing à la manière de… those who really were ‘asses enough to compose’, and the identities of his friends, while sufficient to justify ‘enigma’ as a subtitle, would be unknown and of little interest to an audience; so a more wide-ranging mystery was immediately published.