PITTSBURGH '1812 Overture' didn't start out American

Tchaikovsky knew how to write a barn-burner, said one music expert.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Eliciting images of pitched patriotic battle and especially bombs bursting in air, it would appear the "1812 Overture" is as All-American as apple pie, cookouts and Fourth of July fireworks.
Not quite.
Though the composition -- not complete without cannon fire -- has been inextricably tied to fireworks displays during celebrations of America's independence, it's arguably not what its composer, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, intended.
For one, the composition is a narrative of Napoleon's retreat from Russia in 1812 -- half the world away from America's battles against the British during the War of 1812, which many assume is the center of the song.
And then there's the music itself. Many may not notice, but the "1812 Overture" contains strains of the French national anthem "La Marseillaise" and the old Russian anthem "God Save the Czar."
Why we use it
How the overture, which was first performed in Moscow 70 years after Napoleon was beaten back, came to dominate Independence Day celebrations and almost every lighting of a firework isn't as subversive as it may seem.
Perhaps the primary reason is gunpowder.
"It is the one piece of classical music that includes 'The Bombs Bursting in Air,'" Deane Root, a music professor at the University of Pittsburgh, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in Friday's editions.
Then there's the apparent dearth of American patriotic songs -- including "The Star Spangled Banner" -- that match the intensity and awe of fireworks.
"Tchaikovsky knew how to write a barn-burner, and they are really hard to write," said Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and a conductor and music scholar who has written about Tchaikovsky.
"With the exception of "America the Beautiful," the U.S. is short of patriotic hymns. 'The Star Spangled Banner' is a tongue-twister," Botstein said, "then you have 'America' which is really the British national anthem."
And any composition is open to reinterpretation.
"Almost any way you look at it, a work doesn't end when the composer puts down the double bars -- that's when it begins. That's when it begins the process of reaching an audience and from that moment on takes on a life of its own," said David Grayson, a professor of musicology at the University of Minnesota.
Some ensembles played the "1812 Overture" on Independence Day -- Chicago's Grant Park Orchestra did in 1935 -- but the association between the overture and fireworks can largely be traced to Boston Pops legend Arthur Fiedler in 1974.
Lure for concerts
Hoping to lure more people to the city's summer concerts on the Esplanade, Fiedler decided to perform the "1812 Overture" with fireworks, real cannons and a steeple-bell choir, according to Bridget Carr, archivist of the Boston Symphony.
Since then, the "1812 Overture," Fourth of July fireworks and cookouts have been self-evidently American.
"We remake meanings all the time when we recombine things and pieces," said Root. "When people are raising that Budweiser to the fireworks listening to the '1812 Overture,' they aren't stupid. They are relating to it in an individual way."