Bored on the 4th of July
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - july 10 ]
The 1812 Overture was composed in order to celebrate the defeat of the French in Russia. Why do the Americans always perform it on the Fourth of July?
Every July 4, Independence Day, on the lawn of the Capitol in Washington DC, the National Symphony Orchestra performs a nationally-televised musical ritual with singers, dancers, and a large audience, with fireworks over the Washington Monument, culminating in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, along with DC's church bells ringing and sixteen cannon shots tearing the air in time to the music. Throughout the United States many communities do the same.
Why the 1812 Overture? Americans use many other appropriate patriotic songs even though they lack bells, cannon, and smoke - from Irving Berlin's (1938) syrupy and banal prayer 'God Bless America' to the unsingable and flag-waving 'Star-Spangled Banner', which has the melody of an old drinking song known as 'Anachreon in Heaven', perpetually popular because you have to be drunk to sing it, the new words a verse by Francis Scott Key who saw cannon balls bursting over Ft McHenry at Baltimore, Maryland, in 1814.
Although the best song of them all is Woody Guthrie's (1940) 'This Land Is Your Land', other patriotic songs in the popular canon include 'God Save the Queen' with the newer words 'My Country 'Tis of Thee', the Civil War songs 'Battle Cry of Freedom' and 'Battle Hymn of the Republic', the grateful 'America the Beautiful', and even the George M Cohan songs 'Yankee Doodle Dandy', 'You're a Grand Old Flag', and 'Over There.'
'Over There', written to boost support for the American Expeditionary Force sent to France in 1917, is eerily appropriate today:
Johnnie, get your gun,
Get your gun, get your gun,
Take it on the run,
On the run, on the run.
Hear them calling, you and me,
Every son of liberty.
Hurry right away,
No delay, go today,
Make your daddy glad
To have had such a lad.
Tell your sweetheart not to pine,
To be proud her boy's in line.
Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word over there -
That the Yanks are coming,
The Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming
Ev'rywhere.
So prepare, say a pray'r,
Send the word, send the word to beware.
We'll be over, we're coming over,
And we won't come back till it's over
Over there.
But no, we hear an overture written by Peter Tchaikovsky, a vain Russian composer who did not want to write such program music at all, feeling it beneath his dignity to put together a bit of music he called "showy and noisy, without artistic merit."
At the village of Borodino west of Moscow in 1812, the Russians had stood against the French, sharing over 100,000 casualties. They fell back through Moscow, burning the city behind them. The French, stranded, retreated towards Poland, starving and freezing, losing ninety percent of their men as the Russians harried them.
Composed in the 1880s, the 1812 Overture was intended to celebrate in the 25th Anniversary of Tsar Alexander's coronation, the dedication of the new Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Red Square, and Alexander's big fair, the Moscow Arts and Industry Exhibition.
However, Tchaikovsky never got to hear his masterpiece performed as planned, with electrically fired cannon, and all the church bells ringing. Having freed the serfs and reformed the courts, the liberal Tsar Alexander II met his fate at the hands of a Polish-Lithuanian student, a suicide bomber with the unforgettable name of Ignacy Hryniewiecki.
Iggy caught Alex on Nevsky Prospekt near the Winter Palace. He was careful not to harm anyone else. Iggy was miffed because Alex had suppressed the use of languages dear to him - Polish, Lithuanian, and Belorussian.
The cathedral had golden domes thirty stories high, with sixty-five tons of bells never rung as part of the 1812 Overture. The Soviets demolished it in 1931. It was rebuilt in 1994-99.
There is no reason to play, perform, and sing the 1812 Overture as part of a patriotic celebration in the United States, except that it is noisy, loud, and smoky, everything a battle should be. It has no historical relevance to American independence from Britain. It is "about" the Russian defeat of the French under Napoleon.
Napoleon was on the American side in so far as the French supported the American Revolution and the new republic as part of the Enlightenment, which was mostly a French invention stemming from the Encyclopédie (1751-72) written by the Frenchmen Didérot, Rousseau, Voltaire, and others. Surely their defeat by the Russians in 1812 should not be a reason for Americans to celebrate now, even ritually.
After the defeat of Napoleon, the British turned to problems stemming from the American Revolution.
Firing on American merchant ships trading with French allies, and impressing their sailors into the British Navy, kidnapping them, as it were, the British had blockaded France in 1806.
President Jefferson, who was about to buy Louisiana, which included the entire western Mississippi and Missouri River watersheds, from Napoleon, cast a fatwa against the Brits and the War of 1812 was on.
Known as Madison's War, after James Madison, the fourth president of the United States (1809-17), as a continuation of the American Revolution it defined Upper Canada, north of the Great Lakes.
The British had promised 'Ontario' to American Indians in return for their support. The Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his twin brother, Tenskwatawa, known as ' The Prophet', wanted to live free in the old way. Then the Governor of the Indiana Territory, William Henry Harrison, defeated the Shawnee at Tippecanoe.
After failed attempts to invade Canada, and battles with a massacre near Detroit, Americans burned Toronto (York), Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames (Ontario), and Captain Perry defeated the British fleet on Lake Erie.
In August 1814 the British seized the port of Baltimore near Washington DC. They marched on Washington, finding little resistance at Bladensburg, Maryland, now an urban jungle, where a battle was supposed to happen, but didn't, the Americans running away in confusion.
The president's wife, Dolley Madison, had had a grand celebratory dinner prepared for her husband James and the others on their return from Bladensburg, but she was advised in time to take the state papers and run with them to safety, which she did.
When British General Ross entered Washington under a flag of truce, someone firing from a house killed his horse. Angered at this breach of civility, he ordered the public buildings and the Navy Yard burned, as the Americans had burned Toronto.
On entering the White House, they found the table set for forty, and a sumptuous banquet waiting in the kitchen, which they enjoyed. Then they set fire to the White House. Ross was soon killed in the Battle of Fort McHenry at Baltimore, where Francis Scott Key saw the bombs bursting in air, giving proof to the night that the flag was still there.
So, in addition to the bells, cannon, smoke, its profound reverence toward the Russian Orthodox Church, and its disdain for the French, without whom there would be no United States of America in its present republican form, the 1812 Overture has nothing to recommend it. I would suggest using instead a folksong known in its many, open-ended verses by all Americans from childhood:
TA-RA-RA-BOOM-DE-AY
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay
We have no troop today
Scoutmaster passed away
He died of tooth decay
We threw him in the bay
He scared the fish away
He's never coming out
He smells like sauerkraut!
Surely clever Americans can improvise lyrics to this tune appropriate to the present state of the American polity with a cannon shot on every beat.
