whatever relates to the passions, or that is proper to excite or awake them. The word comes from the Greek πάθος, passion or emotion. See PASSION.

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.

Nieuwentij 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 means he made use of was the variety of motions, &c.