In today's (London) Sunday Times:

   Forget Elgar the Edwardian. Freed from his period he stands revealed
   as a great artist and, as DAVID CAIRNS reports, he is now more popular
   than ever, both here and around the world

                A MIGHTY RESURRECTION

   The immense success of the 50-year-old Elgar's First Symphony in
   1908-10 - a phenomenal 100 performances in not much over a year -
   was the high point of his career, a final reward for the long
   struggles in provincial obscurity.

   Nothing was ever quite as good after that.  Despite the acclaim for
   the Violin Concerto, his popularity followed a declining curve.  The
   Second Symphony was felt to be a disappointment, and Falstaff appealed
   only to the connoisseurs.  Then came the war and, when its horrors
   had receded, it left a reaction against pomp and circumstance and
   the prosperous and complacent values that Elgar's music was assumed
   to epitomise.

   But now, 90 years on, the triumphs of the First Symphony are being
   mirrored in the public response to the Third, the work that Elgar
   left incomplete when he died in 1934, and whose voluminous sketches
   Anthony Payne elaborated into a grand symphonic statement, a summing-up
   of imposing and disturbing force.  Nobody who heard the premiere at
   the Festival Hall last February will forget the thrill of the encounter
   or the atmosphere in the hall during and after the performance - the
   sense of astonished discovery, of a voice from the grave speaking to
   them in familiar but undreamt-of utterance.

   The impact of that memorable evening has reverberated on.  In the 10
   months since, more than 30,000 CDs of the symphony have been sold and
   1,500 copies of the Boosey & Hawkes study score, and there have been 21
   further performances, with another 35 scheduled for performance in the
   coming year.

   Though many of the sounds were new, the voice, in its "heroic
   melancholy" (Yeats's words for it), was familiar and well loved.  Elgar
   has long since sloughed off his Edwardian imperialistic trappings, which
   were never more than the thinnest of outer skins protecting a complex,
   hypersensitive poetic imagination.

   We are at home in the place that Payne has called "the world of
   nervous endeavour, noble resignation and lost innocence" and that
   Elgar's music inhabits, even as we revel in its fabulous richness
   and variety of colour, the eventfulness, the effulgence of the Elgarian
   orchestra (how on earth did the piano-tuner's son brought up on the
   banks of the Severn and in the shadow of the Three Choirs' Festival
   achieve such comprehensive, wide-ranging mastery?).  The symphonies
   and concertos, not to mention The Dream of Gerontius, the Introduction
   and Allegro, and the perennial Enigma Variations, are now part of
   the common experience, and not only in English-speaking countries:
   the Cello Concerto, seized on by more and more cellists, has begun
   to spread Elgar's fame abroad - a movement that is likely to grow
   when Hilary and Jackie, the film about the great cellist Jacqueline
   du Pre, famous for her passionate interpretation of the concerto,
   opens this month.  Elgar's music is heard regularly, though not so
   often that its emotional power and physical presence are lost.

   This is music that does not age.  When conductor and orchestra are
   in tune with it (and orchestras love playing Elgar, because he writes
   such wonderful parts for every section of the orchestra and every
   instrument) each new hearing uncovers further layers of feeling and
   fresh subtleties.

   There is so much in these scores - notonly in their fantastic intricacy
   of texture and tone but in their ambiguities, the constant intimations
   of mortality that lurk beneath.

   I have never been more intensely aware of the darker tones than in
   the magnificent reading of the Second Symphony given last month by
   Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican.  Over
   four concerts Davis and the LSO performed Gerontius, Falstaff, the
   two concertos and all three symphonies, as well as touring No 1 in
   the provinces.  The orchestra has never sounded better, its strident
   trumpets apart, than in the magical coda of the First Symphony's
   Adagio.

   It was the Second Symphony, however, that cut deepest for me.  For
   the first time in my experience, the tragic implications of the work
   were laid bare - not only in the second-movement funeral march, given
   a shattering performance, but throughout.  Elgar prefaced the score
   with a quotation from Shelley:  "Rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit
   of Delight!" We feel its precariousness in the violins' pianissimo
   melodic line reaching yearningly upwards near the middle of the first
   movement, and echoed at various points thereafter.  The work closes
   with an allusion to the harmonic progression that ends Wagner's
   Tristan und Isolde - as though Elgar is saying that delight is not
   realisable in this world.  The music's splendours are threatened by
   inimical forces, from within and without.

   This is the theme of much of his finest music:  the struggle to
   recapture an ideal, glimpsed once and never forgotten, for ever
   drawing him on in quest of it but rarely held within his grasp.  In
   the First Symphony the ideal, embodied in the noble, striding melody
   of the opening, then fading from sight, is finally possessed, even
   as it is assailed ferociously from all sides.  In the Second it has
   to be yielded up, remaining only a memory.  That surely is the meaning
   of the vision of destruction, presaged in the first movement and
   flaming up terrifyingly in the Scherzo.  It is as if Elgar were
   unconsciously prophesying the war that, three years later, would
   annihilate his world and make such dreams no longer possible.

   In the clashing sonorities and desolate harmonies of Elgar 3 we hear,
   surely, an idealist's bleak acceptance of lost illusions.  The boy
   on a white horse riding the Malvern hills, the abiding image in Ken
   Russell's BBC film (shown during the LSO's festival), has gone for
   good.  The symphony can only end as Payne has made it end, with a
   passage based on Elgar's late miniature, The Wagon Passes - a long
   crescendo, ominous, visionary, a coruscating fortissimo, a diminuendo
   dwindling irrevocably, then the resolution of the cadence left
   incomplete in the poignant last bar of the slow movement, and a final
   soft stroke of the tam-tam.  Payne describes in his book, Elgar's
   Third Symphony:  The Story of the Reconstruction (Faber), how:  "The
   blaze of a consuming vision would somehow bridge the gap between
   Elgar's death and the present day, and finally the music would
   disappear as a vapour."

   For Elgar it was the end; but not for his music.  That lives on.
   There have never been so many conductors eager to perform it (and it
   is conductors, above all, who ensure the survival of a composer's
   work):  Colin Davis; Andrew Davis, who conducts the NMC recording of
   Elgar 3 and in December gave the American premiere; Vernon Handley;
   Rattle; Norrington, who has just been performing the First Symphony
   in Berlin; Barenboim, Slatkin, Sinopoli, Andrew Litton, Mark Elder;
   Adrian Brown, whose Stoneleigh Youth Orchestra (average age 16) gave
   two performances of No 3 last month.  Elgar's splendours and
   complexities, his longings and griefs, speak directly to people who
   have forgotten or have never heard of the age he was once supposed
   to embody.  David Cairns

Tony Duggan
Staffordshire,
United Kingdom.