Edward Elgar is often thought of as a conservative who celebrated English traditions in his Pomp and Circumstance Marches. But the composer Richard Strauss heard Elgar's symphonic music and hailed him as adventurous and forward-looking: 'the great English progressivist'. In masterpieces like The Dream of Gerontius and the Cello Concerto, Elgar took British music into the 20th century, but did his arguably repressed personality hold him back from creating a revolutionary new idiom?

Nicholas Kenyon weighs the evidence for Elgar as the distinctive voice of British music.