Jacqueline Kennedy - 9 June, 1968
from Letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to Leonard Bernstein, 9 June 1968, page 490:
Dear Lennie ...Everyone has gone to bed but I just want to stay up by myself – to think about so many things – and about today... ...When your Mahler started to fill (but that is the wrong word – because it was more this sensitive trembling) the Cathedral today – I thought it the most beautiful music I had even heard. I am so glad I didn’t know it – it was this strange music of all the gods who were crying. And then – if only you could have seen it – it was the time when Ethel had thought of the most touching thing – having the little … more >>
Jacqueline Kennedy, Letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to Leonard Bernstein, 9 June 1968. In Nigel Simeone (ed.), The Leonard Bernstein Letters (City of New Haven, 2013), p. 490. https://led.kmi.open.ac.uk/entity/lexp/1388427707732 accessed: 13 October, 2024
Listeners
Listening to
hide composers
Requiem
written by Giuseppe Verdi |
performed by New York Philharmonic |
Symphony No. 5
written by Gustav Mahler |
performed by New York Philharmonic |
Experience Information
Date/Time | 9 June, 1968 |
Medium | live |
Listening Environment | in the company of others, indoors, in public |
Notes
Jacqueline Kennedy (1929-1994), later Jacqueline Onassis, First Lady of the United States during the presidency John F Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. This letter describes the funeral of her brother-in-law Robert Kennedy, assassinated 6 June 1968. At the funeral at St Patrick’s Cathedral New York on 8 June Bernstein conducted 30 members of the New York Philharmonic in the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and the last movement of Verdi’s Requiem.