Recently in Britain there have been several scholarly Elgar conferences. Old assumptions are being challenged, clichés rejected. Critical opinion about Elgar is far less settled than it was at his centenary in 1957. Fifty years ago he seemed a grand phenomenon. At a greater distance he is more of a historical figure, less of a living presence.

It was never true that Elgar was universally regarded simply as a Colonel Blimp, epitomizing England, Empire and Establishment, his music confident and grandiloquent. Certainly, “Land of Hope and Glory” (better known to Americans from the “Pomp and Circumstance” March of countless graduations), the once-in-a-lifetime tune that entered the national consciousness and brought him popular fame, also acted partly as a barrier.

Some people, though always a minority, saw little beyond it, beyond the bristling mustache and the cultivated military appearance. Perceptive listeners, right from the start, heard the nervousness beneath the swagger. The pendulum may indeed have swung too far the other way. Emphasizing the melancholy, tormented undertow to Elgar’s music has brought a danger that his life-affirming, exuberant, glowing side is now underestimated. He may have wished to “curse the power that gave me gifts,” as he once said, but he also knew the “Spirit of Delight” invoked in the epigraph to his Second Symphony.

His range is great. At one extreme are his charming light pieces, like “Salut d’Amour.” They are not negligible, for their melodic appeal and the finish of their workmanship are enduring.

During the decade in which Delius composed his agnostic “Mass of Life” to Nietzsche’s text, Elgar turned to Cardinal Newman for his searing oratorio “The Dream of Gerontius” and offered glimpses of eternity. (The critic Michael Steinberg rates “Gerontius” as the greatest religious work between Verdi’s Requiem and Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”)

The exhilarating but elusive Introduction and Allegro for strings is a bridge between the 18th-century concerto grosso and Vaughan Williams’s “Tallis Fantasia” and Tippett’s Double Concerto. Then there are the enchanting Edwardian-style stage works, “The Starlight Express” and “The Sanguine Fan”; great part songs, still underperformed; and strange miniatures like the song “Submarines.”

Elgar’s two symphonies are psychologically complex, and they explore the harmonic hinterland behind their ostensible keys. Elgar can use limpid scales to express innocence, but at anguished climaxes — in the opening movement of the First Symphony or the Rondo of the Second — the distortion approaches Expressionism.

Commentators argue whether this “typical” Englishman was overemotional or repressed. But it is exactly this tension between passion and inhibition that makes him so compelling.

Elgar was uneasily poised between cultures. Born and rooted in Worcestershire, in verdant central England, he has been seen as primarily a pastoral composer. The American-born Elgar scholar Jerrold Northrop Moore most persuasively argues for this. But as soon as Elgar could afford it, he made a bid for London, and he was at his most carefree vacationing in Bavaria and Italy. He was a Roman Catholic who never composed a mature Mass, and he spent much of his life among the three great Protestant cathedrals of the Three Choirs Festival, accepting an invitation for an Anglican Te Deum and Benedictus. He was born into trade, married into a county family, then leapfrogged over that rank to mingle with the aristocracy.

His contrapuntal technique is essential to the integration of his symphonic movements and is the very web and woof of his “Falstaff.” Yet he wore his hard-won learning lightly. His “Enigma” Variations, which catapulted him to fame in 1899, sound absolutely spontaneous but can bear strict analysis. The eighth variation (‘‘W. N.”), a portrait of a delicate country household, is a tissue of extensions, chromatic inflections and rhythmic and melodic reversals, all ingeniously derived from the theme. Into the bluff, emphatic fourth variation (“W. M. B.”), he nonchalantly tossed a couple of bars of close canon.

His Violin Concerto, given its premiere in London in 1910 by Fritz Kreisler with Elgar conducting, marked the peak of his career. His Second Symphony, of 1911, brought a more puzzled response. Change was in the air. Edward VII was dead; Stravinsky was composing “The Rite of Spring”; the Great War was coming nearer.

That war destroyed Elgar’s world. As it ended, he withdrew inward, composing chamber music and his poignant, haunted Cello Concerto. Was that a requiem for the war dead, for the cultural world he knew, for his own increasing age, even for a lost early love? It could be none or all of these.