Elgar

Self-taught, the son of a music-shop keeper, he made a living teaching violin in Worcestershire into his forties, until the Enigma Variations made him famous overnight in 1899. He never got over his sense of standing outside the English musical establishment.

Each variation is a portrait of a friend, and the ninth, Nimrod, now functions in Britain as music for a state funeral. He said a larger theme was hidden behind the whole set and never played, and no answer to that riddle is generally accepted. The Cello Concerto of 1919, written just after the First World War, is a work about exhaustion and loss; Jacqueline du Pré's recording made it a twentieth-century classic.