Commissioned in 1932 by the BBC, Elgar's Third Symphony was fragmentary and disorganized when he died two years later. He had despairingly asked for the sketches to be destroyed, ordering that no one must tinker with it, but he continued to talk about the symphony and, shortly after his death, his friend W.H. Reed published many of the sketches in facsimile, allowing a glimpse of the composer's final thoughts. This meant that the published sketches...