Was it extreme hunger that made him do it?
Whatever the reason, Elliot Waldman, producer for the Tokyo Broadcasting System in the Washington bureau, felt a need to apologize to the dead composer for getting it wrong in a Pool Report on President Obama‘s trip to Tokyo.
“The motorcade began rolling to it’s next destination at 10:18 while the band played the William Tell Overture,” he wrote in a Wednesday pool report.
He also had a special shout-out to Hannah Hankins “for sharing one of her granola bars with this famished pooler!” (Hankins is a White House press assistant.)
Some 19 minutes later, Waldman was back with his correction.
“The piece the band played as the motorcade rolled away was not the William Tell Overture, but rather the Stars and Stripes Forever, of course, as correctly noted in pool report #3. My apologies to both John Philip Sousa and William Tell.”
William Tell, just for clarity purposes, is an opera created by the composer Gioachino Rossini. He was also reportedly a folk hero in Switzerland in the late 15th century. In the early 1800s’, Friedrich von Schiller wrote a play, Wilhelm Tell, from which Rossini’s opera was written.