EDWARD Elgar was a great post-romantic composer in a European generation that included his close friend Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Zemlinsky and Glazunov.

He was caught in an era between Brahms and Stravinsky so that now he seems far more conservative than he did to the Edwardians.

Then, the innovation of his musical language was exciting and it opened the way for many of the very different 20th century composers who followed.

Just how exciting can be judged from the reception his First Symphony received in 1908.

It was so successful it was performed more than 80 times in its first season, from St Petersburg to New York and from Berlin to Sydney. No other work by a British composer was played in so many places, so fast - before or since. He started it in the month of his 50th birthday, June 1907, and he worked on it alternately in Hereford and Italy - a perfect combination of influences that also marked the two superb works that followed, the Violin Concerto and the Second Symphony.

There has been a tendency over the last 30 years to make Elgar a symbol of all this country's neuroses. People hang on to Land of Hope and Glory because they are unsure about England's place in the world. They forget that he detested the First World War and thought George V's court vulgar.

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hose who look deeper than national symbolism often go to the other extreme in trying to attribute to his music levels of psychological insecurity that are more to do with their own uncertainty than his. Elgar undoubtedly had a prickly personality but he was also immensely attractive to women and a generous champion of young composers and performers.

Almost all his best music was written in the period from 1905- 1920, his 50s and 60s. Yet, at the same time as people began to think of him as old-fashioned, he became the first composer to make recordings of almost all his own music. In fact he did it twice, once into the old acoustic horns and then later with electric microphones. He conducted his own and other people's music all over the world and was Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

The Elgar I admire is not the national icon, the great Englishman, or the complicated genius.

,p> Now he's 150, let's celebrate Elgar not as a part of the English national mythology but as one of the most professional and profound artists of his time.,/p>