Composers are rarely the best judges of their own music, but Sir Edward Elgar knew he had a winner when he crafted the melody that would become "Pomp and Circumstance" March No. 1 in 1901:

"I've got a tune that will knock 'em -- knock 'em flat," he shouted to a friend.

With that, Elgar launched what was to become the centerpiece of his most famous composition. Set with words beginning with "The Land of Hope and Glory," the melody is beloved to the British as an almost second national anthem. It is featured in the country's biggest musical event, the Last Night of the Proms. In America, the tune is better known as the "Graduation March," with its famous trio usually repeated so many times at ceremonies most attendees wouldn't mind being knocked out.

In both cases, however, the later use and perception of Elgar's music has clouded our understanding of it and the composer. In this 150th anniversary year of his birth, his reputation continues to be on the mend. The predominant images of Elgar (1857-1934) are of a formal Brit sporting a full mustache, a somber visage and Edwardian-era attire, his enduring reputation is of a purveyor of nostalgia for Great Britain's glory days.

But the truth is more complex than that. The man who wrote "Pomp and Circumstance" was anything but pompous. He could be sentimental (especially to animals), experienced mood swings and had "a range of occasionally incompatible personality traits such as sociability and misanthropy, bluster and insecurity," says Elgar scholar J.P.E. Harper-Scott. He also was an avid amateur chemist, conducting experiments and inventing devices in a makeshift laboratory in his house. Likewise, much of Elgar's music seethes with emotion and abounds in innovation, in contrast to the perception of a more-or-less stodgy and ceremonious composer unfairly dismissed as passe at the end of his lifetime.

Recently, the dogged identification of his music with English countryside and Britain's waning Empire years has come under question, too. At the very least, these stereotypes disregard his connection to international, particularly Germanic, trends in fin-de-siecle composition.

It's time to give the old chap a fair hearing, undrape the Union Jack from about him.

"I don't think of Elgar as quintessentially English as much as I think of him as a 20th-century Romantic in the same way that Rachmaninoff was," says Leonard Slatkin, who will conduct the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra this weekend in perhaps Elgar's greatest work, the Cello Concerto. Principal cellist Anne Martindale-Williams solos. Slatkin is one of the few American conductors who have consistently conducted Elgar and he has recorded most of his major works, including the Cello Concerto with Janos Starker and the London Philharmonic.

"If you look at his contemporaries and listen to Stanford and Perry and all of those people then you realize how much further ahead he was than all of them. He had great skills as a conductor that gave him the chance to write in a much more virtuosic way. I don't hear much English in the Cello Concerto. I don't hear it in the Violin Concerto, either."

Scholars are inclined to agree that a true, individualized context for Elgar's life and music needs to be rediscovered. "Nowadays the concept of Elgar as an uncomplicated imperialist, a kind of musical Colonel Blimp...is no longer tenable, if it ever was," write the editors of the recently published "Cambridge Companion to Elgar." "For all its continental modernist characteristics, Elgar's music nevertheless remains closely linked with ideas of Englishness, Empire and English landscape," yet the editors remark that, "The question now discussed is whether there is anything intrinsically English about his music at all."

Elgar certainly wasn't to the manor born. He was a Roman Catholic in a staunchly Protestant nation, reared in a lower middle-class family in provincial Worchester and self-taught as a composer in a milieu in which academic credentials were paramount. Elgar's father was a jack of all musical trades -- piano tuner, organist, violinist and pianist -- who drew his son to music early. By 16, Elgar was a church organist and had gigs as a violinist and conductor. He already had begun composing, and that bore fruit in an early appointment to one of the most colorful posts in all of music history: "composer in ordinary" to the County Lunatic Asylum at Powick, which used music in its daily activities for the patients. So, far from a product of the crusty upper class he has been associated with, Elgar succeeded because his intrinsic talents and drive overcame the obstacles and prejudices placed in front of him.

Ironically, during his life Elgar was often characterized as an adherent to the modern German school than the British one. He was largely self-taught in composition, which rendered the composer insecure but drove him to discover the chromatic technique and scope of Richard Wagner and others. Richard Strauss himself drove that point home when he labeled Elgar, "The first English progressivist" in 1902 after hearing "Dream of Gerontius." The German conductor Hans Richter was Elgar's greatest champion.

"Early British reception often thought [Elgar's music German], and early German critics welcomed it as a product of their own culture," says Harper-Scott. "There is simply no precedent for this kind of ambition in British music. His music is post-Wagnerian, not simply in the sense of a similarity in sonority or orchestration but because of the way he handles harmony and long-range form and ... elevated ideas like salvation and rebirth." And, like Strauss, Elgar also had the skill to seamlessly incorporate humor into music. In the "Enigma" Variations, Elgar's irrepressible love for wit and puns comes to the fore. In the eleventh variation, he portrays the bulldog of an organist friend waddling about and fetching a stick.

Slowly, Elgar's reception in Britain shifted with his patriotic writing for ceremonies, marches, charities and the like. "These compositions solidified Elgar's reputation as an important national figure," writes Charles Edward McGuire in "Companion." "Part of his strength, his appeal to a wide public, lies in that simplicity which enabled him to gather an open, honest emotion and cast it into a tune which has entered the national consciousness," writes the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. None more so than "Pomp and Circumstance" March No. 1, which premiered in 1901 and was then reworked with text in the Coronation Ode for Edward VII of 1902. Its tradition in American graduation ceremonies began when it was performed on the organ when Elgar received an honorary doctorate from Yale in 1905. It began to appear at other graduation exercises soon after.

Around and after his death, Elgar's association with Imperial Britain took hold completely, first rendering him unfashionable save for "Enigma" and the Cello Concerto, then simply relegating him to a lesser, nationalist composer. Today, those biases are dissolving to reveal his true genius. "What I hear in these pieces is an individual voice," says Slatkin.