PLAYWRIGHT and novelist David Pownall gave his audience a different view of Sir Edward Elgar.

For him Malvern's famous composer was not the cliche identified with imperial power, but sensitive and even disturbed.

Researching, he said, was the best part of being a writer. Asked to write a play about Elgar by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which became Elgar's Rondo, his first job was to decide what the play was about.

He found Elgar to have been a brave young man, who took on an impossible task when he tried to write music about the process of death in his Dream of Gerontius and nearly stopped writing altogether after its disastrous Birmingham debut in 1900.

Eight years later his confidence was restored after the lauding of his First Symphony, but when he opened himself up in his Second Symphony, another bad reaction destroyed much of his creativity. People saw in it a madness, which Elgar feared in himself and he never wrote in the same way again.