Is music able to express the tragic?

Abstract

This writing raises the question if the musical art is able to really express the  feeling of the tragic, and tries to clarify the relation that exist (if it exists) between the concept of the tragic and the language of music. In particular, it aims to reconstruct the history of this relation beginning by its roots, sunk in Greek tragedy, to arrive at its nearer expressions in the XX century. The accent is on the tragic value of the musical content itself, emphasizing in particular, in the case of the melodrama, the relation that arise between an emotion expressed in words and that that is born of music itself, as well as the apparent contradiction between the beauty of the harmony of polyphonic music and the feeling of the truly tragic.