Friday, February 13, 1998 Published at 13:13 GMT
Elgar's ultimate enigma
Edward Elgar: better late than never?
The composer in question is Edward Elgar who succumbed to illness before he could complete his third symphony. Now the piece has been finished by Anthony Payne, who calls his work an "elaboration" of Elgar's sketches.
Elgar's 'new' work has struck a range of notes, not all enthusiastically sounded, across his family, fans and the musical establishment.
But Elgar's work survived. Many decades later Radio 3, the BBC's classical music network, commissioned the British composer Anthony Payne to take the 141 sketches and shape them into a complete piece, adding his own music where Elgar did not leave sufficient material behind.
Some purists of classical music see Payne's offering as the ultimate sacrilege.
Wulstan Atkins, Elgar's godson who is now 92, last saw the composer 10 days before he died aged 76. "He was planning something quite different from the two earlier symphonies. It was going to be much lighter in texture," he said.
Some Elgar scholars have also accused his family of "feasting off the corpse" of one of the great romantic composers of the 20th Century.
But other critics have hailed the reworking as a triumph.
"You don't have to look any further than the opening bars of the Third Symphony to realise that something special is happening here," said Stephen Johnson of the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
He calls the piece "vintage Elgar. Now that it has been done so superbly, this is absolutely the right decision."
Anthony Payne, an Elgar expert, is also unrepentant, saying he "owed it" to the great composer: "I'm afraid that I find it ridiculous of great artists to say that they want their work burned. If that is really what Elgar intended, he should have burned it himself," he added.
Elgar's stirring "Land of Hope and Glory" is a mainstay and highlight of the "Last Night of the Proms" concert annually held in London in September, and which some view as an outburst of patriotic fervour.
Elgar is reputed to have been urged to write the Third Symphony by playwright George Bernard Shaw when the composer plunged into depression after the death of his wife.
But he is not the only composer to leave work unfinished.
Schubert's Unfinished Symphony is a consistently popular choice of concert goers and Bruckner and Mahler also left behind unfinished symphonies.
Elgar, however, perhaps could have learned from Sibelius. He destroyed the manuscript of his eighth symphony before he died.
A recording of Sunday's performance of Elgar's Symphony No. 3 will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Monday, February 16, at 19:30 GMT