Elgar's historical reputation has rested on his large-scale orchestral music. Through the success of the ‘Enigma’ Variations and the First Symphony in particular, he was seen as the first British composer to have created symphonic music of international scale and importance. Similarly, his last major orchestral work, the Cello Concerto, has often been heard as a retrospective farewell to the whole legacy of nineteenth-century Romantic music – in Michael Kennedy's evocative phrase, ‘music of wood smoke and autumn bonfires, of the evening of life’. While Elgar's choral works have likewise achieved canonic status in the modern repertoire, and the variations and the symphonies belong to the most elevated genre of Austro-German absolute music, Elgar's chamber music and works for strings occupy a more ambivalent historical position. Though the chamber music engages with a venerable tradition of serious instrumental works, Elgar's contribution has sometimes seemed conservative or backward-looking, especially alongside his dynamic work in the modern symphonic field. His works for string orchestra occupy a separate generic category, one that has tended to equate lightness of scoring with lack of musical depth (compare the rhetorical weight of a serenade as opposed to a symphony). But this view is not universally held. For many, Elgar's chamber works offer a vivid summing-up of his life's musical experience. Similarly, among Elgar's varied works for string ensemble, one outstanding masterpiece, the Introduction and Allegro, has had a catalysing influence on later English string music. In this sense, among others, Elgar’s chamber music and works for strings are central to any assessment of his compositional output.