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 >>

cite as

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: 28 March, 2024

Listeners

Jacqueline Kennedy
1929-1994

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.


Originally submitted by Ivan Hewett on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 18:21:47 +0000
Approved on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 08:53:53 +0100