PATHETIC, in Music, something very moving, expressive, or passionate; capable of exciting pity, compassion, anger, or other passions. Thus we speak of the pathetic style, a pathetic figure, pathetic song, &c. The chromatic genus, with its greater and lesser semitones, either ascending or descending, is very proper for the pathetic; as is also an artful management of discords; with a variety of motions, now brisk, now languishing, now swift, now slow.
Nieuwentyt speaks of a musician at Venice who so excelled in the pathetic, that he was able to play any of his auditors into distraction: he says also, that the great
Pathetic great means he made use of was the variety of motions, &c.