Our round-up of the saddest and most haunting songs in musical history

By Hannah Nepilova

Published: Tuesday, 05 September 2023 at 13:27 PM


Few things grab you by the lapels like the most powerful sad songs. They haunt us, move us to tears, and occasionally chill us to the core – making us reflect on issues we’d rather ignore.

I’d never claim to be the ultimate authority on sad songs: there are too many of them to count. Nevertheless, here are just ten – plucked from all corners of the musical repertoire – that have, over the years, imprinted themselves on our memories.

1.Dido’s Lament – Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas

Is it the yearning melody? The chromatically descending ground bass? That sense of distilled despair in the text? There’s certainly something uniquely effective about this aria from Purcell’s 1688 opera Dido and Aeneas, in which Dido, distraught at Aeneas’s betrayal, prepares to kill herself. For all its surface simplicity, Dido’s lament is full of musical sleights of hand, not least its leaning appoggiaturas in the vocal part, and ornamentation in the strings, all of which conspire to make this one of the most tragic, and famous arias in the history of English opera.