The visage of composer Sir Edward Elgar is shortly to be removed from Britain’s £20 note, which has set off yet another round of the seemingly endless debate over whether Elgar was or was not the UK’s greatest composer. “Now that modernism has receded, we can see the originality of these co-called ‘conservative’ composers more clearly. Strauss, Sibelius and Elgar now seem in their own way just as symptomatic of the troubling modern era as Stravinsky or Schoenberg.”