“If we taught music better in schools, we would understand Elgar more, for a case can be made that he and his music are central to that most crucial of understandings: of ourselves, and where we come from. … When you hear Elgar at his greatest – in the Second Symphony, in the Violin Concerto, above all in Falstaff – you hear an English spirit released from the confinement of social and critical disdain. He is proving his detractors – present and future – wrong in the extreme.”