It's Independence Day! We can have a picnic lunch, shoot off some fireworks (if legal in your location), go to a baseball game, watch fireworks, listen to patriotic music!
If you're in Boston, you can go to the Esplanade along the Charles River and listen to the venerable Boston Pops Orchestra play such thoroughly American tunes as the "Stars and Stripes Forever," "America the Beautiful" and -- the 1812 Overture!
The what?
Yes, the 1812 Overture! Because nothing is more patriotically American than a song written by a patriotic Russian celebrating the military defeat of one of America's longest-standing allies that also includes a glorious tribute to one of the more despotic lines of European royalty!
Remember the American Revolutionary War? The one that cropped up right after we issued a Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776? Oh, yeah, kind of the whole point was to prove that we could exist independently of despotic European (in this case British) kings. But we blithely accept the 1812 Overture's use of the Czarist Anthem in our celebrations of independence.
And yes, the French army over whose defeat the overture gloats with a rather sardonic quotation of "La Marseillaise" was led by Napoleon Bonaparte, a revolutionary despot with whom the U.S. had something of an on-again, off-again relationship.
But I've always been bemused by American orchestras' adoption of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture as an American patriotic piece. Much of that phenomenon may have to do with Arthur Fiedler's inclusion of the work in the Pops' annual Fourth of July concerts on the Esplanade, complete with cannons, bells and fireworks. He did that to bolster sagging attendance -- and it worked! That event is widely seen as the premier Fourth of July celebration in the U.S.
Tchaikovsky himself didn't particularly like the overture. He wrote it because there was a very nice commission involved. He knew it was raucous and didn't have much artistic merit.
It's also an interesting side note that neither "La Marseillaise" nor the Czarist Anthem, the themes in the overture representing the opposing armies in France's ill-fated invasion of Russia, would have been heard by either side in 1812. Napoleon had banned "La Marseillaise," which came out of the French Revolution, and the Czarist Anthem wasn't written til a good 20 years later.
But today, enjoy the freedom to grill you some hot dogs, quaff some good American beer, whistle the Trio from "Stars and Stripes Forever" -- and leave Russia to the Russians.
