Musical composition paying tribute to JFK, Robert and Ted Kennedy unveiled by Boston Pops

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Boston Pops unveils musical tribute to Kennedys

BOSTON — Robert De Niro has played a lot of tough guys in his acting career, but a softer side quickly emerged as he recalled his friendship with the Kennedy family.

“There’s a long history,” said De Niro, choking back tears Tuesday just hours before he was to help the Boston Pops perform the world premiere of a musical tribute to President John F. Kennedy and Sens. Robert and Edward Kennedy. “I get emotional … about the whole family,” De Niro said, his distinctive voice trailing off to a whisper.

Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris and Cherry Jones joined De Niro as celebrity narrators for “The Dream Lives On: A Portrait of the Kennedy Brothers,” at Boston’s historic Symphony Hall.

Boston Pops Conductor Keith Lockhart commissioned composer Peter Boyer and lyricist Lynn Ahrens to write the piece, which will be performed several other times this season as a centerpiece of the orchestra’s 125th anniversary season.

Excerpts of some of the brothers’ most iconic speeches are intertwined with music and video during the multimedia presentation. Freeman said he expected the result to be a moving tribute to the brothers.

“One would think these particular chosen words backed up by the music created for them will add a little something to your emotional state,” the actor said.

Lockhart said he began thinking of a tribute to JFK several years ago that would feature Ted Kennedy as narrator. After the senator, an avid Pops fan, died of brain cancer last August, Lockhart decided it was time for a work celebrating all three of the brothers.

In the fall, he approached Kennedy’s widow, Vicki Kennedy, who embraced the project and later got the blessing of the rest of the family during Thanksgiving dinner in Hyannis Port. She also offered some advice.

“Please don’t involve us in the creation of it,” Lockhart recalled her saying. “If you think the U.S. Senate is bad, you don’t want everyone in this family to be deciding which quotes they want to be in the (piece).”

“I think the brothers, even though they were all very much their own people and achieved things in their own way, they really in a way represented a constellation of ideas,” Ted Kennedy Jr. said during a family reception shortly before the premiere. “They grew up together, worked together, and they were each other’s best friends, of course they were in politics together and so it’s kind of fitting that they’re all together in music.”

Boyer, whose previous best-known composition was the Grammy-nominated “Ellis Island: The Dream of America,” gained inspiration by visiting the brothers’ graves at Arlington National Cemetery.

“I stood there for a very long time in front of JFK’s grave and the eternal flame just thinking in this freezing January cold and trying to get my head around what I was going to do,” Boyer said in an interview.

“I actually had a couple of moments where I thought, ‘Can you actually do this?’”

Ahrens, whose Broadway credits include “Ragtime” and “Seussical the Musical,” was given the task of putting the music to words and selecting from the multitude of famous Kennedy quotes. She begins with one of JFK’s most familiar exhortations: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans … .”

Ahrens said she kept the narration sparse so the story would be told mostly through the Kennedys’ own words.

Asked if the Pops could bring a fresh perspective to those words — heard and quoted so often and in so many settings over the years — Lockhart said no musical composition of this kind had ever been done for the Kennedys and the only comparison was Aaron Copland’s 1942 Lincoln Portrait, which includes excerpts from the Gettysburg Address and other works of Abraham Lincoln.

“I hope the brothers would have been proud of what we are going to do,” Lockhart said as the orchestra prepared for its first and only rehearsal before the premiere.

“I only have an idea of what Ted would have thought. Ted loved showmanship, and Ted would have insisted on a singing role,” he joked.

Freeman said he was certain the brothers would be pleased, adding that if you believe in the hereafter, “I bet they are giving each other high fives.”