What's the difference between elegy and requiem?

Elegy


Definition:

  • (n.) A mournful or plaintive poem; a funereal song; a poem of lamentation.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Place names and plant names assume the status of chants or litanies: spectral taxa incanted as elegy, or as a means to conjure back.
  • (2) More recently, Iain Sinclair, in his novel Dining on Stones, an elegy to the A13, describes it as: "A landscape to die for: haze lifting to a high clear morning, pylons, distant road, an escarpment of multi-coloured containers, a magical blend of nature and artifice."
  • (3) You can contribute questions, comments, predictions, thoughts, premature elegies, over-the-top obituaries or hushed theories about what David Stern has told tonight's officials by emailing them to hunter.felt.freelance@guardiannews.com or tweeting them to @HunterFelt .
  • (4) His great book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946 but written while Auerbach was a wartime exile teaching Romance languages in Istanbul, was meant to be a testament to the diversity and concreteness of the reality represented in western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf; but reading the 1951 essay one senses that, for Auerbach, the great book he wrote was an elegy for a period when people could interpret texts philologically, concretely, sensitively, and intuitively, using erudition and an excellent command of several languages to support the kind of understanding that Goethe advocated for his understanding of Islamic literature.
  • (5) And yet, the result is exactly the same: a face that is not so much a face but rather a sad elegy for what might have been.
  • (6) The result was a masterpiece: a funny, lyrical, wise travelogue which was at once a defence of the wild water that was left and an elegy for that which had gone.
  • (7) The Last Ship is "an elegy for and a celebration of the working-class life of the Newcastle shipyards," according to the Public Theater's artistic director Oskar Eustis, who says it is "shaping up to be a masterpiece".
  • (8) "The mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable," said Michael Wood, reviewing American Pastoral in the New York Times , "and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated."
  • (9) At the centre of the book is a series of intertwined relationships: there are love poems, poems that explore relationships between languages – versions of CP Cavafy from the Greek, poems in Scots, reworkings of New Testament verse – poems about people he knew, such as an elegy for poet Mick Imlah with whom Crawford co-edited an anthology of Scottish verse, as well as poems about the relationship between history and values.
  • (10) There's a famous passage in John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in which retired agent Connie Sachs drifts into a drunken elegy for the young men of the 1950s, the lost souls who fetched up in Smiley's Circus.
  • (11) The Fix reads only like bitterness, an unconscious elegy to shame; add Iain Duncan Smith's coerced AA meetings, and fair treatment for addicts feels, as ever, far away.
  • (12) When "Sapho to Philaenis" is set in the context of Donne's other love elegies in verse as productions by a young intellectual moving in sophisticated London circles and writing for a coterie audience, lesbianism looks like a master trope for positively resolving a dilemma that confounded Montaigne and many other authors of the age.
  • (13) Kim Brandstrup’s Ceremony of Innocence uses Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937) to create a haunting elegy for lost youth, with outstanding roles for its leads Edward Watson and Marcelino Sambé.
  • (14) But with Ukip, it is not just an elegy for a mythical age, but also a call to action.
  • (15) But when, after a troubled hiatus, he returned to complete the manuscript in 1883, what had begun as a reminiscent celebration became a darker elegy for a lost world.
  • (16) The chorus of empathetic responses to the tragic shootings at the Aurora movie theater, near Denver, Colorado early Friday morning marks a stubborn refrain in a perennial American elegy.
  • (17) Ruth Rendell, crime writer, dies aged 85 Read more I woke up this morning to a distant view of dark hills and grey skies and thought inevitably about the opening stanza of WH Auden’s elegy to WB Yeats: The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
  • (18) Their street chants yelled "Death to all those against the Supreme Leader" followed by traditional Shia rituals and elegies.
  • (19) Lipton is a Willy Loman for the 21st century, whose song is an elegy for the passing of an American dream – one that told successive generations that, so long as they worked hard and played by the rules, they'd be better off than their parents.
  • (20) The portraits Freud made of his mother, beginning in 1972 and ending with a drawing from her deathbed in 1989, are a remarkable elegy of ageing and depression.

Requiem


Definition:

  • (n.) A mass said or sung for the repose of a departed soul.
  • (n.) Any grand musical composition, performed in honor of a deceased person.
  • (n.) Rest; quiet; peace.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The orchestra was also not allowed to perform Mozart’s Requiem last month.
  • (2) Referring to Foster and O’Neill shaking hands in the church at a requiem mass for McGuinness, Dodds said: “That handshake represented a reaching out but that inclusivity was not then carried into the talks.” The last public political act by McGuinness was to resign as deputy first minister of Northern Ireland in January.
  • (3) While any of the bands who filled Bastille-shaped holes in charts gone by – Keane, for instance – followed a tune-heavy path of least resistance, there's an enjoyably dark edge to Bastille, which begins to make sense when Smith admits that as a teen he was obsessed with Darren Aronofosky's film Requiem for a Dream.
  • (4) To all intents, it was a requiem for both men’s illustrious prizefighting.
  • (5) Church also said Murdoch asked her to sing the Pie Jesu without realising it was part of the requiem mass and hardly appropriate for a wedding.
  • (6) Trouble was,” said Ali, as if they could hear him, “nobody was holdin’ me.” From the Vault: Requiem for the heavyweights | Guardian Classic Read more Who can hold him now?
  • (7) It should be obvious that a steak is not like a symphony, a pie not like a passaglia, foie gras not like a fugue; that the "composition" of a menu is not like the composition of a requiem; that the cook heating things in the kitchen and arranging them on a plate is not the artistic equal of Charlie Parker.
  • (8) Demonstrators, who had bought tickets, broke out in song during the orchestra’s performance of Johannes Brahms’ Requiem and unfurled banners in support of Brown.
  • (9) Kubrick famously didn't ask composer György Ligeti's permission to use extended chunks of his music, which he cut and spliced as if it were film, but the dense clusters and clouds of sound of Ligeti's Requiem and Atmosphères make the climactic Jupiter and Beyond sequence trippily unforgettable.
  • (10) MacMillan subsisted on an insalubrious diet of alcohol, cigarettes, antidepressants and psychoanalysis – and yet still produced definitive works, including Manon, Elite Syncopations (a rare comedy) and Requiem.
  • (11) Alongside the requiem, performed on Wednesday by a string ensemble, Church performed This Bitter Earth, which was made famous in the 1960s by the singer Dinah Washington.
  • (12) Key films: The space between words (BBC); Decision series (ITV); Police series (BBC), In Search of Law and Order UK & USA series (Channel 4); September mourning (ITV), Murder blues (BBC), Requiem for Detroit?
  • (13) But this is no requiem for the death of the genre's innocence.
  • (14) There was sometimes a feeling in his later performances and recordings that the old, familiar sense of challenge had gone gentle; his Mahler Eighth Symphony in Berlin, for example, proved a surprisingly soft-grained conclusion to a Mahler cycle on disc that had begun with a far greater sense of dynamism (it was the only Mahler symphony he would later fail to conduct in Lucerne, where an advertised performance was pulled and replaced by the Mozart Requiem).
  • (15) "He had specifically asked for me to sing Pie Jesu," Church said, adding that she had responded by questioning whether a funeral requiem was suitable for a wedding.
  • (16) Different musical ensembles – from brass bands to bagpipes – have been playing the four-part movement Requiem for Arctic Ice , as activists hand Shell employees on their way to work a copy of the music and a contact email address should they decide to blow the whistle.
  • (17) And there's as much magic in one bar of, say, Knussen's Violin Concerto, or any of the songs from his nakedly expressive Requiem: Songs for Sue, or in the glittering piano writing of Ophelia's Last Dance, as there is in the rest of the Mercury shortlist put together.
  • (18) But, coming days before Trump’s inauguration, it should be read also as an unwitting requiem for the global order that is passing away.
  • (19) We have mapped the cleavage sites of four restriction enzymes which recognize six-base sequences within the nuclear ribosomal (rRNA) genes of twelve vertebrates, including several placental mammals (Homo sapiens, man; Bos taurus, cow; Equus caballus, horse; Sus scofra, pig; Ovis aries, sheep; Rattus rattus, rat), a marsupial (Didelphis marsupialis, opossum), a bird (Gallus domesticus, chicken), an amphibian (Xenopus laevis), a reptile (Alligator mississipiensis), a bony fish (Cynoscion nebulosus, sea trout), and a cartilagenous fish (Carcharhinus species, requiem shark).
  • (20) A second Britten score, Sinfonia da Requiem (1940) leads Christopher Wheeldon into the darker terrain of war and sacrifice in his densely imagined ballet Aeternum (revived this season after its 2013 premiere).