Purcell - Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary , as featured in A Clockwork Orange
I always find The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald movingly sad and haunting.
Someone made a very nice video memorial using this song here:
Speaking of Johnny Cash, his songs don’t get much sadder than “I Hung My Head”.
“I felt the power of death over life
I orphaned his children; I widowed his wife.”
Sad: “Homeward Bound” by Simon and Garfunkle.
Haunting: “Mull of Kintyre” by - Wings? and “The Long and Winding Road” (I’d like that played at my funeral).
I think “Anachie Gordon” is the saddest song I’ve ever heard. There are a few versions on youtube, but the definitive one (which is not) is by Mary Black.
Some others:
Bless the Weather by John Martyn.
Banks of the Nile by Fotheringay (I’m always pushing this song).
“Train Song” by Eliza Carthy.
Under the Ancient Maple Tree - Heinichen (Wish I could find a copy of it)
The Garden - Einsturzende Neubauten
Death is the Road to Awe - Clint Mansell
Softly and gently, dearly ransomed Soul, the final section of The Dream of Gerontius. “If this doesn’t break your heart, it’s time to check in for a transplant.”
Grigorio Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus. We have a bunch of vain castrati to thank for the twiddly bits, which weren’t in the original and wouldn’t be in it now had said castrati not wanted to show off their high Cs.
The remembrance hymn O Valiant Hearts. Rev’d C. Harris’s The Supreme Sacrifice is such a perfect setting of it I can’t imagine why anyone ever used another tune. I cried like a little girl while singing this the year before last.
When the Tigers Broke Free – Pink Floyd
The Idiot – Stan Rogers
One Tin Soldier – Original Caste
Moonlight Sonata – Ludwig von Beethoven
Sounds of Silence – Simon and Garfunkel
Who Would Jesus Bomb – David Rovics
Vitali Chaconne - moving violin piece which speaks of regrets and tears (or so I feel).
Two Little Boys - Rolf Harris (ignore the do-it-yourself video and listen to the song). It’s a jaunty tune with a happy ending, and yet if you aren’t in tears (or at least feeling a lump in your throat) during the second chorus, well…you aren’t listening.
Tangential Factoid: The Adagio in G Minor is not by Tomaso Albinoni but was written in 1945 by Albinoni scholar Remo Giazotto “based on a fragment by” Albinoni. Just thought you’d like to know.
‘The Death March’ in Handel’s Samson. Of course, immediately afterwards, you get ‘Let the Bright Seraphim’.
I love the album “Raising Sand” by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, but I simply can not listen to the final track, “Your Long Journey”, because it’s just too sad. Maybe you have to be “of a certain age” to really feel that… to see yourself, and your loved one, getting older, and to know that one or the other of you may be feeling the sentiments of that song all too soon.
I wonder if anyone here recalls the old series “The World at War”. I saw it on PBS back in the 70s. I found the theme music incredibly haunting… I’m not sure, but I think it’s an excerpt from Messaien’s “Quartet for the End of Time”, written while he was a prisoner of war in Germany, and premiered at his prison camp in 1941.
I always used to find the last part of Cashman & West’s “American City Suite” to be a real tear-jerker.
Oh, and Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away” is pretty depressing.
There’s a million others… “Dimming of the Day” by Richard Thompson, “Angel from Montgomery” by John Prine (actually almost anything from that album, like “Sam Stone”), “Carmelita” by Warren Zevon, “Young and Innocent Days” by the Kinks…
If you’re after haunting/sad music, a lot of songs from the Civil War definitely qualify. “All Quiet Along the Potamac”, “The Vacant Chair”, “Just Before the Battle, Mother”, and “Tenting Tonight” are good ones. It was a very sentimental age. If you search on YouTube, they are easy to find.
As “All Quiet…” is probably my favorite of these, I’ve included this link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17DLZ3IU0_I&feature=related
As a parenthetical remark (just short of a hijack), evidently lots of folks think “Ashoken Farewell” dates from the Civil war. It was actually composed in 1982 by Jay Ungar, and then used as a theme in Ken Burn’s series about the Civil War, which made it very popular. It was the only contemporary piece of music in that production - all the rest of the music was from the Civil War period.