Sad Classical Music

Lynn Sislo posts about sad classical music. (Apparently she gets search engine hits on that phrase, so I'm going to repeat it: sad classical music. Music that is classical, and sad. Sad music that is also classical. Classical things that are sad and that are music. Yep, that oughta do it!)

Anyway, I've never found any sad classical music, in the sense of "music that makes me feel sad". Classical music can meditate on sadness, but somehow there's something I always find uplifting in such music, exalting if you will, that works against the actual creation of sadness. There's music that is wistful (Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending, music that is melancholy (any number of Chopin piano pieces), music that is meditative (Rachmaninov's Vespers), music that is heartbreakingly beautiful (Rachmaninov's entire Second Symphony), but actually sad? I just can't think of any.

Well, that's not quite true. Berg's Violin Concerto is probably sad. Portions of Mozart's Requiem are sad, but other parts are fiery, some angry, some just plain fiery. Mahler's Ninth Symphony is sad, I think. But the list of genuinely sad classical works is, to me, very short. What many might consider "sad music" often ends up to me being something of a meditation on sadness, which isn't quite the same as being sad.

(I haven't said anything about lieder and the vast amount of art songs, because that's the part of classical music that I know the least about, to a spectacular degree. When you factor in words, music can become very sad indeed. From the rock and country music worlds, I can probably fill this blog with sad songs, by virtue of the lyrics. I'm sure that Hugo Wolf and Franz Schubert wrote some genuinely sad songs.)