TWO AUDIO PIECES [caption id="attachment_3715" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Cardinal Cushing with Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy and Mrs. Rose Kennedy at Holy Cross Cathedral, Boston, January 19, 1964"][/caption] If you look back through this blog you'll find an entry about a performance of Mozart's Requiem given in memory of President John F. Kennedy at Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston on January 19, 1964. The mass was celebrated by Richard Cardinal Cushing (1895-1970), Archbishop of Boston and a close friend of the Kennedy family (Archbishop Cushing married JFK and Jacqueline Bouvier, and presided at the President's funeral eight weeks before this event). I've already posted some audio clips of the performance. Here are a few more. These are in poor sound and have been dragged off of the battered commemorative LPs published by RCA in 1964. To my knowledge none of this has ever been published on CD, although the mass was televised live from the Cathedral. Erich Leinsdorf conducted the Boston Symphony, with the Chorus Pro Musica, the combined Harvard-Radcliffe Glee Clubs, and the Chorus of the New England Conservatory. The vocal soloists were Sara Mae Endich, soprano, Eunice Alberts, contralto, Nicholas di Virgilio, tenor and Mac Morgan, bass. Jacqueline Kennedy attended, as did the late President's mother and siblings. A web search tuned up an article by Neil McCabe in the Boston Pilot, January 23, 2009, recalling the Mozart Requiem for JFK forty-five years earlier: At 9:30 a.m., thirty minutes before the Mass began, Cardinal Cushing met Jacqueline Kennedy at the rear of the cathedral and escorted her to the front pew. Most of the 1,800 congregants were already seated, as were the 180 singers from the three choirs and the members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who sat on a raised platform on the Gospel, or left, side of the altar. Sitting with the President's mother, Rose Kennedy, in the front right hand pew was her son, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, and his then-wife, Joan Bennett Kennedy, who were already seated when the cardinal escorted the president's widow down the aisle to join them...Bennett Kennedy said later, "I don't remember it as a sad occasion. I remember it being rather joyful because of all the people who came because they loved Jack and they wanted to be part of the Mass...the music was wonderful and beautiful." The Pilot's music critic at the time, Joseph McLellen, wrote of the requiem: "One thing we have learned from President Kennedy's death and all that followed it: the uses of ritual. There was a grief that transcended personal expression, a depth of feeling that words could not convey and tears could not assuage". Here's Cardinal Cushing with the seminarians of St. John's Seminary, Boston, with the Introit of the Mass: [audio:cushing] Mozart: Requiem, Domine Jesu Christe (selection) and Hostias-with apologies for the sound quality [audio:mozart-jfk-hostias] (Mozart left his setting of the Requiem mass unfinished at his death, December 5, 1791. The performance here uses the edition completed by Mozart's pupil, Franz Xaver Sussmayr) -Christopher Purdy
More of the Mozart Requiem performed for JFK, January 19, 1964
