YourClassical

Classical music wasn't JFK's favorite, but composers loved him anyway

John F. Kennedy
President John F. Kennedy delivers his inauguration address, January 20, 1961.
Kennedy Library

Despite his administration's well-deserved reputation for support of the arts, John F. Kennedy didn't have much of an ear for classical music. In fact, the 35th president was nervous that when classical ensembles would play at the White House, he wouldn't know when the concert had ended. (A secretary helped him by placing a door ajar when the evening's last piece had begun.)

As we mark the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination, many classical music listeners are revisiting the haunting audio of Erich Leinsdorf announcing the news of the president's death to an audience at Symphony Hall in Boston. In the years since that terrible day, number of classical composers have written musical tributes to Kennedy.

One of the first pieces composed in Kennedy's honor marked the happy occasion of his inauguration. From Sea to Shining Sea, an overture by Pulitzer-winning composer John La Montaine, was the first piece of classical music ever commissioned specifically for a presidential inaugural and kicked off the 1961 celebration.

The highest-profile composer to pay tribute to the fallen president after his death was Igor Stravinsky, whose twelve-tone Elegy for J.F.K. (1964) would certainly have confounded its subject. The text, which Stravinsky asked poet W.H. Auden to write, is in four stanzas of haiku.

Peter Lieberson took a much more accessible approach, inspired by Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait. In Lieberson's Remembering JFK, a composition that premiered 50 years after Kennedy's inauguration, a narrator recites excerpts from the president's speeches over an emotive orchestral backdrop.

Other composers who have penned tributes to JFK include Herbert Howells (Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing), Warren Benson (The Leaves Are Falling), Donald MacInnis (In Memoriam John F. Kennedy), and dozens more. (Listen for the Dallas Wind Symphony's performance of The Leaves Are Falling, conducted by Jerry Junkin, this afternoon on Performance Today.)

Leonard Bernstein dedicated his third symphony, which premiered shortly after Kennedy's assassination, to the late president. Even before that symphony's premiere, Bernstein paid tribute to JFK with a performance of Gustav Mahler's "Resurrection" symphony, broadcast over television to a grieving nation.

Though he wasn't a classical music lover himself, the king of "Camelot" will doubtless continue to inspire composers in decades to come. "What he is fated to become," as Auden wrote in his Elegy, "Depends on us/ Remembering his death/ How we choose to live/ Will decide its meaning."

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