The 1812 Overture by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is one of those Classical music clichés, overplayed to the point of banality, the one that way too many parents and music teachers play for children in misbegotten hopes that something with live cannons in a crowded concert hall will finally get them to quit listening to rap or rock or whatever and maybe tune into the Classical radio station instead–which is mildly ironic, precisely because the 1812 Overture is such an overplayed cliché, that it rarely gets played anymore by Classical radio DJs who don’t want to come off as basic to their refined and cultured audiences or what have you.

It’s the sort of piece that your local city Philharmonic or Symphony Orchestra will regularly play around the 4th of July in order to drum up ticket sales and donors, no matter how much the individual players and conductors may be sick of it by now (the same way every single ballet company puts on Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite every single Christmas–the one time the larger populace pretends to actually care about ballet–because that’s what finally pushes the ballet company’s finances back into the black in time for the New Year).

It is of course not the 1812 Overture’s fault that it is so overplayed, but it is indeed overplayed, such that even if you personally have a personal affection for the piece, you keep it to yourself when you are around other Classical music aficionados, who as a general rule prefer to cite something a little more off the beaten path when listing off their favorite Classical works. In more layman’s terms, citing the 1812 as your favorite Classical work is like citing the Eagles as your favorite Rock band, or Blink-182 as your favorite Punk band, or “Stairway to Heaven” as your favorite Led Zeppelin song; you may even be entirely sincere in those takes! But absolutely no one is going to take your musical opinions seriously after that.

Indeed, I had not seriously listened to the 1812 Overture since a child myself. I certainly didn’t hate it, and I definitely didn’t change the station on those rare occasions when it did appear on Classical radio, and I probably used it more than once myself to try to entice someone to maybe try out more Classical music themselves; nevertheless, it simply did not ever occur to me to cite it as one of my all-time favorites (I’m more of a Debussy guy myself). I knew the basic background of the piece, of course–that much like Tolstoy’s War and Peace which was written around this same era, it is was centered around Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 as experienced from the Russian side, and is an unapologetically patriot celebration of the heroes who honest-to-god defended their country against staggering odds–but as an American myself, I largely only associated the War of 1812 (when I thought about it at all) with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the burning down of the White House by Canada and the fact that Andrew Jackson won the face-saving Battle of New Orleans several weeks after the war had technically ended. In sum, both the War of 1812 itself and the Russian angle on it felt far too foreign, remote, and distant from my own lived experience for the Overture to really move me much.

That is, right up until Election Day 2020. If you will recall, it took literal days to call the winner. There was initially this “red mirage” on election day when all the conservative voters who refused to take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously had voted in person, and so it initially appeared that multiple swing states had gone for the pedophile rapist; that is, until the millions of mail-in ballots sent in by everyone who did take the pandemic seriously began to be counted. Not just America, but the world entire, waited with bated breath to see what would happen. Hence, the immense relief and celebration within my household at least, when by the end of the week, the vote was finally certified for Obama’s old VP. My wife and I ate a fine BBQ dinner on our back porch to celebrate.

And then later that evening I put on my face-mask and ran to the grocery store, because we were short on milk and the baby was hungry, because even amidst the single most important election of my lifetime, with the highest and most life-threatening of stakes, life still goes on and you need to run out for milk. I had put the Classical music station on in the car–something I was listening to far more of in those days, during the incredibly stressful year of 2020, to calm my constantly jangled nerves.

And lo and behold, the 1812 Overture came on.

And I suddenly had to pull over the car, because I started ugly crying, in a manner I had never done before for a Classical piece (not even for Debussy). The overture team opens with this long, slow, melancholy build-up of the overture–meant to represent the Russian army, ragged and under-provisioned, making one strategic retreat after another before the seemingly unstoppable onslaught of the French Grand Armée–but which now felt like the long, slow melancholy of the past four solid years of flagrant lies, corruption, and gross incompetence. But then the wild ringing church bells kick in (at 12:55 in the video linked above), as the Russian army finally takes their stand before the gates of Moscow itself. Standing stolid and proud, the bells and swelling strings build up to the cannons, which unleash holy hell upon the invaders in the thrilling climax of the Overture. And in a flash, for perhaps the first time in my life, I fully understood this song: Because their country was under siege, but they finally all stood together, with courage and purpose and the highest of stakes, and fended off the combined forces of ferocity, viciousness, and cruelty that threatened them.

Suddenly the 1812 Overture didn’t seem like such a cliché anymore; suddenly it didn’t feel so distant or irrelevant to my own time; suddenly I comprehended it on a bone-deep level, because I and so many of my fellow Americans–the largest voter turnout in U.S. history–had also finally stood together, and with courage and purpose and the highest of stakes, stood against the combined forces of ferocity, viciousness, and cruelty that threatened us.

Now I couldn’t have cared less how much of an absolute noob it would make me look to cite the 1812 as my all-time favorite Classical piece. I had students you see, who were immigrants, refugees, minorities, Mexicans, Muslims, Haitians, sexual assault survivors, and innumerable more who had been absolutely terrorized by the brazenly vicious actions and rhetoric of the rapist’s administration—evil men and “spiritual darkness in high places,” for whom the cruelty was the point—and it felt so good to finally have done something to protect these my neighbors, to have risen up with my fellow countrymen to protect the least of these.

It was a long while before I could listen to the 1812 Overture again. As you can imagine, I most definitely did not end up listening to it after Election 2024, nor in the two years since then.

Until last Wednesday morning, when I woke up, checked the news, and finally put it on once more, and let myself ugly cry in sheer relief once more.