Letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to Leonard Bernstein, 9 June 1968

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

490

text excerpt

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 nephews and nieces, small children, before that terrifying array of Cardinals and gold and Gothic vaults, carry all the little vessles for Communion up to the high altar, so they could have some part in the farewell to the uncle they all loved so much. They were so vulnerable – and your music was everything in my heart, of peace and pain and such drowning beauty. You could just shut your eyes and be lost in it forever... So out of all the confusion – all your days of conferring, postponing, cancelling, adding, etc., etc., etc., - with every one under strain and out of control, I think something emerged that is as beautiful as your Mahler, and that is the way you have been, through all of this... I think your goodness and those few soaring moments of Mahler together are more beautiful than if you had played the most beautiful Requiem all the way through. And it was so much more appropriate for this Kennedy – my Kaleidoscopic brother-in-law - and his wife who loved him mystically. If there had been anything organized or unified about it, it would not have been Bobby and Ethel!

excerpt from 'Letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to Leonard Bernstein, 9 June 1968' pp. 490 (310 words)

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1388427707732