THROUGHOUT his long years of dogged striving, of eventual triumph and of elderly decline, Sir Edward Elgar was constantly concerned, not only with being a composer, but also with the fashioning and manipulation of his image.

Elgar's most enduring self-image was that of the martyred genius, pursuing the highest imaginative calling and writing transcendent music from out of his "insidest inside", suffering for his greatness.

Yet there was also a very different Elgar: the socially-ambitious self-promoter, obsessed with fame and titles and royalty, who was determined to conquer the great world, and who eventually did so with remarkable success.

And there is a third Elgar, who has only recently begun to come into focus: the businessman in the tradition of Dickens and Trollope, who understood the relationship between creativity and cash, productivity and revenue, and who was more successful at making money than he was keen to let on.

Elgar was immensely proud of his Worcester origins: he lived here until his marriage in 1889, he remained abidingly loyal to it thereafter and he spent the last five years of his life here.

In 1931, he was given a Baronetcy, and became Sir Edward Elgar of Broadheath, in homage to his birthplace.

Some of Elgar's music undoubtedly reflected the contemporary preoccupation with Empire but he also possessed a strong sense of the world beyond the shores of the British Isles: but for him,that world was not so much imperial as European and cosmopolitan, cultural, not political.

In the final phase of his life, his personality had changed with the nation's culture - domestic, wounded and introverted, rather than bombastic and imperial.

On his death in 1934 the offer was made to bury him in Westminster Abbey, the ultimate accolade of establishment acceptance and veneration. The offer was refused, and Elgar was laid to rest next to his wife in the graveyard of St Wulstan's Church in Little Malvern.

Elgar's world has disappeared, but the music lives on. Yet if we are to understand his achievement, the history of his music is inseparable from the history of is life, and neither can be understood without the history of his times.

By Prof David Cannandine