Elgar's Third Symphony

Elgar's Third Symphony has long been one of the great unknowns of twentieth-century music. Commissioned in 1932 by the BBC, it appeared fragmentary and disorganized when Elgar died in 1934. A few months before his death, he asked for his sketches to be destroyed, saying that 'No one must tinker with it'. Yet he continued to talk about the Symphony, even writing out passages that seem almost to be instructions for its completion. In 1935 his great friend, W. H. Reed, published many of the sketche