‘In Elgar we get an example of a composer, in touch with both his audience and his period, expressing himself nationally in an international language’—thus Constant Lambert writing in 1933 (Music Ho!, published the following year) with characteristic insight and (for the time) uncanny, sympathetic accuracy. Not an obituary—Elgar was still among those present—but it would have made a perceptive one for either man. But what was Lambert’s ‘period’, and what the ‘himself’ he expressed with such stealthy eloquence?