Elgar's Third Symphony: The Story of the Reconstruction

Elgar's Third Symphony has long been one of the great unknowns of twentieth-century music. Commissioned in 1932 by the BBC, it was apparently fragmentary and disorganized when Elgar died in 1934. A few months before his death, Elgar despairingly asked for his sketches to be destroyed, saying, in words that came to be interpreted as a command, 'No one must tinker with it.'But he continued to talk about the Symphony, even writing out passages that seem almost to be instructions for its completion. And shortly after his death, his great friend, W. H. Reed, published many of the sketches in facsimile, allowing a tantalizing glimpse of the composer's final thoughts. That meant that the published sketches for the Symphony would eventually come out of copyright, and that anyone would be able to 'tinker with it'. Before this could happen, Elgar's family decided to commission the composer Anthony Payne to make a full-length realization of the work, first performed to great acclaim in February 1998.Anthony Payne's account of his twenty-five-year involvement with the Symphony's sketches is one of the most absorbing stories in recent musical history. He explains the difficult decisions that he had to make to fill the gaps that Elgar left, and the responsibility that he felt in 'completing' the last work of England's greatest composer.