Threnody

(from Gk. thrēnōdia: ‘lamentation’).

A poem, or its musical setting, expressing a strong feeling of grief for the dead; the term has much the same meaning as ‘lament’. ‘Threnody’ has also been used as a title for purely instrumental compositions of an elegiac nature, such as Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 solo strings (1960). For the tragicomic threnody in the last act of his opera Albert Herring (1947) Britten used a structure similar to that of the classical thrēnos, which alternated a ritornello for chorus with solo passages.

MALCOLM BOYD