The weather forecast was seasonable but bearable for this July 4, as St. Louisans display the flag and head out for carnivals and parades, brats and pork steaks, potato salad and corn-on-the-cob, cold beer, a slice of watermelon for dessert and a fireworks display as a nightcap.

Why do we celebrate?

Because 234 years ago, leading citizens representing "the thirteen united States of America" assembled in Philadelphia. They unanimously declared themselves to be "Free and Independent States" forever "Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown."

They declared "these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" and that "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

They appealed "to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of (their) intentions" and "mutually pledged" to each other their "lives," "fortunes" and 'sacred Honor."

All of it, and every part of it, is a cause for celebration.

Independence Day this year also brings a uniquely American story, one with a deep St. Louis connections, that came to our attention in e-mail forwarded by St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay. Marcello Garofalo, an accomplished music teacher and conductor in New York, had initiated the correspondence. He wrote to the mayor about his father, Carlo Giorgio Garofalo.

The elder Mr. Garofalo was born in Rome in 1886. He attended a music conservatory, studied organ and composition and performed in cathedrals.

As a young man, he began composing sacred music for choir and organ. In 1910, he emigrated to Boston to become music director at a Catholic parish. There he started work on what would become his greatest composition: the Romantic Symphony of St. Louis.

The orchestral work, with organ, premiered in St. Louis in 1915. It was performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra to enthusiastic reviews.

But Mr. Garofalo returned to Europe, where war, politics in the music world, personal bad luck and shifts in popular tastes to modernist works conspired to keep the Romantic Symphony from reaching a wide audience. It drew interest from leading figures in the music world but was never performed again before Mr. Garofalo's death in 1962.

Marcello Garofalo wrote to Mr. Slay in hopes of reviving his father's work. It was just the latest chapter in a campaign he has been waging for nearly 50 years.

This spring, Mr. Garafalo sent us his cache of correspondence documenting his dogged attempts to return his father's artistic legacy to St. Louis.

In the mid-1960s, he had a forceful advocate in J. Raymond Dyer, a St. Louis lawyer and descendant of the city's founder, Rene August Chouteau.

Mr. Dyer provided the symphony's scores to Post-Dispatch music critic Thomas B. Sherman. Mr. Sherman, in turn, sent them on to Eleazar de Carvalho, music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Sherman reported in 1964 that Maestro de Carvalho had decided to "put this work on a program to be performed during the season 1965-66," with the proposed performance to "take place exactly fifty years after its premier in 1915."

It never came to pass. Maestro de Carvalho did not explain why.

Mr. Garafalo persevered. He introduced his father's work to a succession of symphony maestros and leaders of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, from Joseph Cardinal Ritter to Archbishop Robert Carlson.

He won a European premier for the Romantic Symphony of St. Louis in 1994, performed by the New Moscow Symphony under the leadership of Joel Spiegelman, an acclaimed American composer and conductor.

We contacted Mr. Spiegelman last week to ask for his thoughts on how St. Louis might stage a revival of the symphony here.

"This work without question deserves an honored place in our orchestral repertory, especially inasmuch as even way before my time, Toscanini, Nikisch and Bernstein showed interest in playing it," he told us.

"This may be one of our very last romantic symphonies, and it should be included in the repertory on the standard masterwork.

"I hope that the directors of the St. Louis Symphony would have the wisdom to give it another chance; 1915 is a long time ago."

Here's an idea: Design teams from around the world were in St. Louis last week to meet with organizers of the international competition seeking concepts to expand and reanimate the national park of which the Gateway Arch is the centerpiece. The competition also hopes to better connect the national park to the surrounding community.

Their design concepts will be completed and publicly displayed in August. The winners will be announced in September.

Among the contest criteria is a requirement that the proposed work be capable of completion by 2015. By happy coincidence, that marks the centennial of the premier of Carlo Giorgio Garofalo's Romantic Symphony of St. Louis.

Eero Saarinen's great Arch long has been the heart of Fourth of July festivities in St. Louis. Fair St. Louis is in its 30th year. It draws hundreds of thousands people, with musical performances always a centerpiece of the celebration.

Imagine a Fair St. Louis in 2015 that revives the master composition of an immigrant composer first performed 100 years earlier by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, when this still-diverse city truly was a city of immigrants.

Imagine the composition played once more by this great orchestra, this time in the shadow of a Norwegian-American's architectural masterpiece, adjacent to the Dred Scott Courthouse at a newly imagined national park that commemorates the great westward migration.

That would be an American symphony.