Symphony No. 3 (Elgar)

Edward Elgar's Third Symphony was incomplete at the time of his death in 1934. Elgar left 130 pages of sketches which the British composer Anthony Payne worked on for many years, producing a complete symphony in 1997, officially known as "Edward Elgar: the sketches for Symphony No 3 elaborated by Anthony Payne" or in brief "Elgar/Payne Symphony No 3". The first public performance was at the Royal Festival Hall on 15 February 1998, by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis.

After the death of his wife in 1920, Elgar retreated into semi-retirement, producing no large-scale works. His friend and champion George Bernard Shaw held that the BBC should commission a new Elgar symphony, and with the aid of Landon Ronald he persuaded the BBC to do so. Elgar worked on the new piece during the last year of his life, jotting down many short snatches of a few bars as well as some pages in full score.

Realising that he would not complete the score, the dying Elgar did not destroy the sketches, and made contradictory remarks about the unfinished work. He told his friend, the violinist W. H. "Billy" Reed, "Don’t let anyone tinker with it", but to his doctor he said, "If I can’t complete the Third Symphony, somebody will complete it – or write a better one." Elgar and Reed had often played through various sketches for the symphony on violin and piano, and Reed knew more than anyone about Elgar's intentions. Reed reproduced more than forty pages of the most important sketches in his book Elgar as I Knew Him in 1936, probably to illustrate what he believed to be the impossibility of weaving them into a coherent whole. But their publication meant that seventy years later they would come into the public domain and the Elgar family would be powerless to prevent anyone "tinkering" with them.

In 1974, a BBC Radio 3 producer, Dr Roger Fiske, devised a programme about the Symphony, and orchestrated some of the sketches, completed Elgar's unfinished scoring and composed some other passages. Elgar's daughter gave her approval and Sir Adrian Boult agreed to conduct the music. The score was sent for copying to Maurice Johnstone, a former BBC head of music. Johnstone felt strongly that the broadcast would amount to “tinkering” with the score and he successfully persuaded Boult to withdraw from the project on ethical grounds and the programme was subsequently dropped. A similar proposed feature for BBC television in 1979 also came to nothing.

...
Wikipedia