The first two qualities a great composer needs are talent and technique; the first you either have or you don't, the second you can learn. But these two aren't enough - otherwise Saint-Saens and Glazunov would have been great composers, along with a host of other journeymen you've never heard of (and any musical biography like Michael Kennedy's Portrait of Elgar, which I've just finished, will mention in passing a host of half-forgotten names).
The third quality in this non-exhaustive list is the ability to write memorable and distinctive material - it's the quality of the invention, stupid. But there is a fourth quality which is equally a sine qua non, and it's a hard one to articulate. You have to have the right kind of personality; because ultimately its the kind of person you are that limits what you can achieve. Beethoven, for example, exhibits himself as someone with a vast emotional and intellectual range, passionate about humanity, nature and God, with a variety and range of output to match. This is also true of Mozart and Brahms. For other composers the situation is more complex. Mahler's range is much narrower, in my view, perhaps pithily summed up by the sentence, "I'm dying". This is also true of Shostakovitch ("Stalin was horrid to me") and a host of smaller figures. It seems to me that the true measure of the classical greats is not that they had so much talent, but that they had so much to say. When in the 30s Sibelius felt he had nothing more, he stopped writing. Nielsen died, but I suspect had a lot more to give. Berlioz could have gone on forever.
What about Elgar? The Worcester genius has, like Vaughan Williams, been criticised for nostalgia, but I think this is unfair. The Lark Ascending isn't about a dead bird after all, and Elgar wasn't mourning the disappearance of the pre-1914 world - much of his best work dates from before the war, Enigma from 1899, for example. But undoubtedly Elgar was a bit of a professional whinger. He whinged about his low social status, about the indifference of the British public, about the meanness of his publishers, the poor standard of performance he had to endure and about his health. He complained about America (when he was engaged on sell-out tours there to conduct his own music). He complained when a lesser-known composer's work was given equal rehearsal time to his own. He walked out of a dinner because the organisers forgot about his Order of Merit and put him on the wrong table. He was constantly threatening to give up music because of its indifferent reception (and this was a man given a knighthood and befriended by the King). Elgar's first symphony was given over one hundred performances in the year after its premiere; but that still didn't stem the litany of complaint.
These characteristics should, and do, tell us quite a lot about Elgar the composer. He is very very good at complaining, musically, and if one had to generalise about the tone of his work it would probably be fair to say that it laments that things are not as they should be. To be fair, this lament is often couched in music of the utmost beauty, subtlety and radiance; but there is quite a high proportion of lamenting going on. When you sit down to listen to a piece by Elgar it is rare to be surprised by the tone. This explains both the appeal of his music and the limitations of that appeal, and that's why my favourite Elgar pieces are the Introduction and Allegro (simple, artless, energetic, poignant, and as Kennedy says, amongst the best half-dozen string pieces ever written), and the Cello Concerto. The Concerto in particular, a late work given a poor first performance and slow to make its way into the repertoire, is a masterpiece, sui generis, unique in form, economical in proportions, terse, and balanced perfectly between haunted emotionalism and rumbustious high spirits. If there is a work which better demonstrates how to orchestrate a concertante piece I don't know of it - there is only one tutti (the last few bars), yet there is plenty for the orchestra to do; the instrumental writing is full of colour and variety, yet the soloist can always be heard. There is no wallowing in the emotion, and the music is for once with Elgar entirely devoid of sentimentality (for any artist a quality as seductively fatal as heroin).
If these pieces are the best of Elgar, it is partly because they contrast with the less-good, of which the worst is perhaps The Music Makers, a setting of Arthur O'Shaughnessy's Ode by turns self-pitying and self-indulgent. I once played the fiddle in a performance of The Music Makers at the Barbican. Ted Heath was in the audience; I hope he enjoyed it more than I did. As Kennedy and others have pointed out, it's not Elgar's fault that the poem is so bad. It is however Elgar's fault that he chose to set it, and it is entirely in keeping with what we know about Elgar's personality that he thought the poem good.
For Elgar had another quality beyond the ones I've mentioned above. He thought (correctly) that he was a much better composer than most of his contemporaries; he was unrepentant about this, and unashamed about expressing it publicly; his musical personality was to a significant extent based around the failure, real and imaginary, of Britain and the rest of the musical world to give his talent its due. In fact the overwhelming majority of people sufficiently driven to call themselves composers would have given their right arm to have had a career like Elgar's, and his failure to realise this marks a failure to understand the world as it really is. And it is an artist's capacity for understanding of the world which is the ultimate test. A sense of personal entitlement can be a spur to effort, but carried too far into a composer's work it is limiting, and I personally think it limited Elgar.
That Beethoven, to give only one example, was a greater man may be seen not only from his refusal to bow down before the onset of deafness (an infinitely greater trial than anything Elgar had to put up with), but also the refusal to allow his affliction to dominate his work. Rather than greater raw talent or technique, it's the personality which this ability to rise above one's circumstances exemplifies that makes Beethoven a greater composer.
