July 17, 2025

Secrets and Codes… Music with Hidden Meanings.

Secrets and Codes… Music with Hidden Meanings.

Instances where composers have hidden something in their works… sometimes for the sheer ingeniousness of being able to do it… sometimes to send a secret message to someone… sometime to create a puzzle for generations to come… sometimes to create a tortured ambiguity of meaning. The music is from a pretty eclectic mix… Johann Sebastain Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Edward Elgar. Lots of Secrets.

 

And here is a link to an extended playlist on Spotify with the full versions of most of the music in the episode:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4nf2z4kcTcWp6jRlK1biVK?si=36685f1d8e734b93

Here is the link to the YouTube Video on Musical Notation mentioned in this episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNNhlAlGrpw

Ad here is the website for the At The World's End Festival in New Zealand:

https://www.worldsedgefestival.com

 

 

Transcript

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you.

And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for today it is… Secrets and Codes… the instances where composers have hidden something in their works… sometimes for the sheer ingeniousness of being able to do it… sometimes to send a secret message to someone… sometime to create a puzzle for generations to come… sometimes to create a tortured ambiguity of meaning. The music will be from a pretty eclectic mix… Johann Sebastain Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Edward Elgar.

And in a few minutes I am going to tell you a little about a music festival in the southern alps of New Zealand coming up in October which I am hoping might be the sort of thing listeners to a podcast called Classical For Everyone could be interested in. But first.. musical secrets and codes.

I’m going to start with three minutes of Johann Sebastain Bach performed by the pianist Andras Schiff. It is known as his Sinfonia No. 9. And just to be secretive I’ll tell you the relevance to this episode’s theme after the piece.

A

That was J S Bach’s Sinfonia No. 9 performed by the pianist Andras Schiff.

Now, this first example of a secret or a code in music is pretty simple. In that piece Bach took the letters of his surname and used music to spell it out by writing a sequence where he used the notes B, A, C & H.

Ok let me interrupt with a little confession. I have read that sentence or sentences like it in concert program notes and in books for years and never, truly never stopped to ask.. hang on how did he get an H?

Indulge me in a quick moment of musical notation stuff. It is easiest to think of the white keys of a piano. There are repeated groups of seven of them. With some black keys in between but forget about them for a minute. The seven keys play the notes we call A, B, C, D, E, F & G. Then it goes back to A again as you go up the keyboard. So, if Bach want to write his surname with music he can do B, then A and then C… but where’s the H coming from?

Now even when the notes or books explain that in German musical culture what English speakers call a B is in Germany an H, I have still never bothered to do more than shrug… think to myself, well that makes no sense at all… and move on. But there is a really good explanation… which I am going to tell you as succinctly as possible. Remember the black keys on the piano? They are also known as sharps and flats… they are either a sharper… meaning higher sounding, or a flatter.. meaning lower sounding version of the note or key beside them.

So, to get back to the mysterious H… beside the white B key is a black key called a B flat. But in the 1500’s when sheet music was being printed for the first time marking the difference between these two Bs was typographically difficult. In handwritten versions a written lower case B was used for the B flat and a strange symbol that looked like a lower case B but with the bottom round part looking more like a square was used for the B.

But, early printers did not have metal type for this odd little symbol for the infrequent occasions they printed music… So they grabbed something that looked pretty similar… a lower case H.

And that is how in Germany the note that English speakers think of as B Flat is called B and what we call B is called an H. And that is how J S Bach gets the final letter of his surname into his music. And apparently the B A C H notes appear quite a lot in the piece of music I just played you. Or that is what the Internet has told me to which I direct your enquiries if you want more detail.  Though I will put a link to a great video that explains the whole ‘why is B called H’ thing in this episode’s show notes.

So, with this episode I promised Secrets and Codes. I’ve delved into a bit of musical code and now some secrecy from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Here is the Overture to his and Emmanuel Schikaneder’s opera The Magic Flute. It is about 7 minutes long and is performed here by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan.

B

That was the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan with the overture to The Magic Flute. So what does the opera ‘The Magic Flute’ have to do with secrecy?

Well, it hinges on the fraternal organisation, the Freemasons, who In Vienna in the late 1700’s were a remarkably influential force… on the one hand embodying the bright clarity of Enlightenment values... of morality, justice, and reason… and on the other hand mired in secret rituals, invented histories and mysterious global connections… and a lot of aprons. Their veiled form of something like Christianity alienated the Catholic Church and after leading masons in France participated in the French Revolution autocracies throughout Europe were starting to cast a wary eye on these groups of free-thinking men. Now both the composer and the librettist of the ‘The Magic Flute’ were Masons… Mozart and the writer / actor / impresario Emmanuel Schikaneder. And The Magic Flute is filled with references to Freemasonry. But because one of the central tenets of Freemasonry is to keep everything secret… what were they actually doing referring to Ancient Egypt, imitating supposedly secret knocks in the music, and using the mystically powerful number three?

If they were revealing the deep secrets of the Masons then this would have been a very bad idea… apart from the obvious breaking of vows to keep secrets it would have been professionally very unwise as the masonic network was fruitful for patronage. Were they making up fake masonic references to mislead people? Were they given permission to subtly expose some positive aspects of the Brotherhood to push back against shifting political sands? Were they drinking heavily? Much as many scholars have tried to unravel these questions… except perhaps the last one… no one really knows.

After over two hundred years the secrets of why The Magic Flute is filled with Masonic references and what they really mean are still hidden from us. And will very probably forever remain… secret.

What is not secret… is that a few episodes back I recommended that if you have the chance to get close to live music performed in small spaces, also known as chamber music, then you should do it. And a few days back I received an email telling me about such an opportunity. And it sounds so good, I am going to take a moment to tell you about it. It is the ‘At The World’s Edge Festival’ which is running for eight days this October in the towns of Wanaka, Queenstown, Cromwell and Bannockburn… nestled in the Southern Alps of New Zealand.

There are seven concerts planned as well as supporting events and the artists performing include the UK violinist Anthony Marwood, the Australian harpsichordist Erin Helyard, plus a bunch of other remarkable performers including the Festival Directors Benjamin Baker and Justine Cormack. And the composer in residence is John Psathas whose work ‘View From Olympus’ you may have heard some of a few weeks back on the podcast.

If you have been to Queenstown and surrounding areas then you don’t need me to sell you on the location. If you haven’t and you’ve always been a little tempted then I really can’t think of a better reason to take the trip to this amazing part of the world. One of the reasons I’m feeling pretty evangelical about this festival is that I was in this part of New Zealand only a few weeks back. The only thing that would have improved a pretty special weekend might have been a couple of concerts of exquisitely performed music in small spaces.

We are talking about October (and I’m recording this in July) so no matter where in the world you are listening to this podcast you probably have time to get yourself organised to get to the ‘At The World’s Edge Festival’. There is a whole lot more information at the Festival’s Website which is worldsedgefestival.com   that’s worldsedgefestival.com…   and there’s no punctuation in the word ‘worlds’ in the web address.

I will put a link in the show notes to this episode. And… Thanks to the Festival for getting in touch.

Back to Secrets and Codes. And now the music of Robert Schumann. I’m going to play you six of the set of very short pieces for piano he called ‘Carnaval’ from 1835 when Schumann was in his mid 20’s.  The critical ones for this episode are the first two. The others I’m playing just because they are great. So the title of the first one is… seriously…   A. S. C. H. S. C. H. A. (Dancing Letters). So, there’s a code. What’s the secret? Well, the name of the town of Asch is spelt out in the first four letters and that was where Schumann’s fiancé was from. So maybe more of an in joke than a secret… but still music hiding information.

By the way you may have noticed the appearance of another unexpected letter. The letter S. How do you get an S? Well, it’s maybe a bit of a cheat but the name in German music circles of the note E Flat is written as capital ‘E’ followed by a lower case ‘s’. And if you put them together you get ‘Es’ which is phonetically identical to the letter S. Conveniently it works both ways in German and English so this explanation fortunately didn’t involve medieval typography.

I said there was another section of ‘Carnaval’ of significance to the episode. It is the second one I am going to play and it is titled ‘Chiarina’ which was the nickname of the young piano student Clara Weick who would ultimately become Schumann’s wife. Writers argue that Schumann was already showing signs of the profound attraction to Clara that would dominate their lives.

If they are right then Certainly at the time he wrote these pieces that would have been a well-kept secret.Here is the Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire. (FrayRee)    with six excerpts from Robert Schmann’s Carnaval… starting with A. S. C. H. S. C. H. A. (Dancing Letters). And then followed by ‘Chiarina’

C

That was the pianist Nelson Freire. (FrayRee) playing six sections of ‘Carnaval’ by Robert Schumann.

Ok we are leaping forward to 1926 and to the music is the composer Alban Berg. It is his Lyric Suite. He publicly dedicated the work to the composer Alexander Zemlinsky but years after Berg’s death the American scholar and composer George Perle found an annotated version of the score in Berg’s papers and discovered that the Lyric Suite had another secret dedicatee… Hanna Fuchs-Robbetin who was Berg’s lover as well as the husband of a friend and supporter of Berg’s. In the score Berg wrote to his lover…

My Hanna, I have secretly inserted our initials, HF and AB, into the music. I have written these, and much that has other meanings, into the score for you. ... May it be a small monument to a great love.

As far as I can tell this secret outlived both Alban and Hanna.

I’m going to play you the first section of the string orchestra arrangement of the piece that Berg did in 1928. It is a little more accessible than the original version for string quartet but to be fair Berg was part of a movement exploring new ways to put musical sounds together and on first listen this can be slightly challenging. But there is a quite strange beauty to the music. We are so used to sort of romantic clichés when it comes to music purporting to describe love… and this a world away from them. But there is I think genuine passion in it and as I’ve discussed that was certainly the intention from Berg.

It is 6 and a half minutes long and here is Herbert von Karajan conducting the strings of the Berlin Philharmonic with the first section of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite.

D

That was Herbert von Karajan conducting the strings of the Berlin Philharmonic with the first section of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite.

So I have talked a bit about musical codes and interpersonal secrets in compositions but the next piece I am going to play you is in the ambiguous area of political secrecy.

What on earth am I talking about? So the piece is the final section of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony from 1937. Quick bit of Soviet History. The low estimate of the number of people murdered by Joseph Stalin in the peak years of what are known as the Purges… those years being 1936 to 1938 is 700,000. The killings disproportionately focused on intellectuals and artists. Ok. By the middle of the 1930s Shostakovich was one of the most successful composers in the Soviet Union. But in 1936 the state Newspaper Pravda had published an unsigned damning review of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. This was followed by an attack on his ballet The Limpid Stream. He was then instructed by the Union of Composers to withdraw his Fourth Symphony which he had just completed. Many of his friends distanced themselves from him, his work dried up and he kept a packed suitcase by the front door of his apartment so he would not disturb his family if, as he expected, he was taken away in the middle of the night.

That did not happen but he was coached to write more ‘acceptable’ music for the regime. And when he completed his 5th symphony, which fortunately met official expectations, Shostakovich’s public response to this ordeal printed in Moscow’s daily newspaper was…

Among the reviews, which often analyzed the work in thorough detail, one that particularly delighted me stated that the Fifth Symphony was a Soviet artist's no-nonsense response to fair criticism.

But in the problematic collection of reminiscences published after Shostakovich’s death called ‘Testimony’ he is quoted as saying about the very ending of the symphony…

The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, "Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing", and you rise, shaky, and go marching on, muttering, "Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.

Critics are divided. Did Shostakovich write brazen and triumphant celebratory music supporting the Soviet way of life… or did he lace the music with just enough irony and exaggeration to be secretly crying out against the brutality and horror of those years both for him personally and for the country at large? I lean to the latter but Shostakovich’s intention will remain a secret.But the most important thing is that the music is just sensational. The whole symphony is incredible  and really a great introduction to Shostakovich’s symphonies. But I’m just going to play you the eleven minute conclusion. Here is the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Bernard Haitink. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.

E

That was the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Bernard Haitink with the conclusion of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. I have another couple of pieces coming up but before I get to them I want to give you a little information that I hope you find useful… If you would like to listen to past episodes, of which there are more than a dozen, or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net. And on the individual episode pages of the website there are links to Spotify playlists with the full versions of most of the music played in each of the episodes.

I hope you have enjoyed this Musical Secrets and Codes focused episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’. If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts. That would also mean the search algorithms will smile more benignly on the show and it might reach a few more people. For that I would be very grateful. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net.

Alright, to finish this episode I have some music that could not have been better named for this episode… Edward Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’. Completed in 1899 the work is an orchestral set of a theme and fourteen variations. Elgar gave each of the sections a coded name referring to friends and colleagues. Eventually the wider public was able to discover the particular identities but it was for some years an interesting guessing game. But on top of this in his writings Elgar alluded to another secret puzzle… or enigma… a hidden foundational melody at the core of the entire work waiting to be discovered. But to this day it never has been. I’m going to play you the variation called Nimrod. In the Old Testament the character of Nimrod is described as a great Hunter. People eventually worked out that the solution to the puzzle of who was Nimrod in Elgar’s world was the music publisher Augustus Jaeger… whose surname was the German word for Hunter. Here is David Zinman conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra with Nimrod from Edward Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’. It’s about five minutes long. And it is pretty damn beautiful. On the CD it says this is recorded in 4K Surround Sound which I’m not sure will make a difference to a podcast but you never know.

G

That was David Zinman conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra with Nimrod from Edward Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’. This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never.

And if you have listened to the credits… here is a little bonus for you…

One of the last works for solo piano written by Johannes Brahms was the set of six pieces he called Intermezzos from 1893. The final one has a depth of emotion that seems to reflect the unrequited or unfulfilled love he felt for his friend and mentor Robert Schumann’s widow Clara. And he wrote the set as a comfort for her at the end of her life. This is the same Clara who had been the subject of Schumann’s ‘Chiarina’ written more than fifty years earlier which I played you a while back in this episode.

Is Brahms being secretive? I think yes. For me he is putting into music what he could not put into words. At least not publicly. And music being music, we’re never going to know what those words would have been. That’s a secret.

Here’s the pianist Wilhelm Kempf. Thanks again for listening.