Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” is the one that gets me, especially the last line in this stanza:
What moments divine, what raptures serene,
'Till clouds came along to disperse
the joys we had tasted . . .
Now, when I hear people curse
the chance that was wasted,
I know but too well what they mean.
I like the Ella Fitzgerald version the best, although it’s maybe not the saddest. That’s because with all the awful sadness of this world, you have to admit that it produced Ella Fitzgerald, so it’s not all bad.
In English and German, to double the heartbreak of Poor Bastards sent to their deaths for nothing. Now we need a French version. And Italian, Russian, etc.
Yeah, this. Here’s the performance in London only a couple of days after 9/11, at the last night of the annual Prom Festival, with the American conductor Leonard Slatkin in charge.
The atmosphere was very different that year from what it usually is.
Also Gorecki’s Third Symphony. Here’s a part, Dawn Upshaw singing
And another contender, a bit more crying into your beer and whisky, The Pogues - A Rainy Night in Soho:
Kesha’s “"The Harold Song” has really grown on me in the last month or so (even though I’ve been hearing it since January.) It’s especially sad when she performs it in concert:
Reminds me a bit of Aase’s Tod. I don’t know if is somehow cheating the rules of sadsongology to just hover over someone’s death like this, but it does the job.
The way the artists in Apocalyptica make their cellos weep in Farewell gives me shivers; especially at the end, once the lead cello has built up to its cathartic melancholy wail.
The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. My 30-year-old uncle died of a heroin overdose/possible suicide and had a very intense relationship with his mother. She was the only one who would put up with his shit. Whenever I hear it, I think of him, and I think of her crying, ‘‘I tried so hard to help him,’’ over and over before the funeral.
I recall we once we had a thread like this, and someone suggested ‘‘Killkelly, Ireland.’’ I’d never heard of it. I think it’s the saddest song I’ve ever heard. (If you don’t want YouTube, google the lyrics. But trust me. It’s sad.)
[QUOTE=billfish]
The song in this video is pretty sad IMO, called I think Its a Mad World or something like that.
[/QUOTE]
The saddest application of Mad World I’ve ever seen is when they did a So You Think You Can Dance Routine about a businessmen stumbling into a homeless man and realizing they knew each other from high school. The actual performance starts at 1:07 here.
Works on multiple levels.