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The Enigma Variations, an orchestral work (1899) by British composer Edward Elgar. Elgar's most popular and widely performed work, it was originally entitled Variations on an Original Theme. Each of the variations is a musical portrait of a friend of Elgar, identified in the score only by his or her initials or nickname. The title of Elgar's piece influenced the Berlin engineer who built the now-famed German military cipher machine known as Enigma, a typewriter-like device capable of producing an infinite number of ciphers.
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