How "progressive" was Elgar?

I also really enjoyed the Thomson article that we read for Thursday's class this week. I loved that from the beginning of the article it pointed out the contradiction that we see in Elgar's opinion and in addition to the opinion of the critics. I thought that it was so funny that Elgar praised critics and likened their opinion to what we now consider a job of a musicologist to analyze reception history. I also think that it is funny that it was then these well known critics such as Fuller-Maitland who despised Elgar so much. Again the concept of him not being accepted into the upper class due to his lower class birth comes up and this, in the article, really seems to be the argument for all of the criticism that he received from these people. Because personally, even with the well presented argument about his use of leitmotif and chromaticism I still don't hear the "progressive tendencies" in Elgar's music. I think that it is true that maybe it isn't quite as square and in the box as Parry' ultra conservative approach to composition, but I think that maybe it is the slightly more unique sound that really makes us remember Elgar for being a little bit different. I just found it so interesting that during that time Elgar would be lumped together as a progressive such as Wagner or Strauss. Is it maybe just because the full impact that Wagner had on music thought the development of composers like Schoenberg hadn't occurred. It is obvious that the Wagner debate was very important at the time and that it was in the forefront of many people's mind, but I would be interested to see if the criticism would have been similar knowing what we know now. Maybe this is out of the scope of this class, but it is surprising that Schoenberg doesn’t come up when we talk about the progressives of this time. Did this other progressive style not reach as far as England at this time? It would be interesting to see if this influenced any of our Victorians or not.