The phrase "a note of tragedy" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a subtle or underlying element of sadness or misfortune in a situation, story, or piece of art.
Example: "The film had a note of tragedy that lingered long after the credits rolled."
Alternatives: "an air of sorrow" or "a hint of sadness."
Watching the movie thirty years later, though, a jarring note of tragedy, surely unintended, creeps in.
And the story's violent climax, which is meant to signify the end of an era, feels stage-managed, too, as if it had been mechanically shoehorned into the narrative to inject an extra note of tragedy.
"Reverend Billy's Tent Revival," a 90-minute show running occasional Sundays and on Sept. 11 at the Spiegeltent through Oct. 1, projects an additional note of tragedy and loss: it reminds its audience that when large corporations decide to leave their imprint on local areas, neighborhood identity and self-sovereignty are destroyed.
It's an odd, tortured and self-torturing postwar drama hitting a note of grandiose domestic tragedy, adapted from Philip Roth's award-winning 1997 novel, though often more resembling something by John Irving.
To add a note of farce to the tragedy, the administration has had to explain that the CIA is not torturing prisoners at its secret prisons in Asia and Eastern Europe though of course it cannot confirm that such prisons exist.The nub of the torture debate is an amendment sponsored by John McCain, a Republican senator who was himself tortured by the Vietnamese.
Hustvedt has a lot of very entertaining satirical fun in The Blazing World, but that particular note of tragedy, though she tries to sound it, remains lost.
But their film, wild and emotional as it is, does not quite hit the deep, resonant note of tragedy that would lift it above the merely (by which I mean the merely very) good.
Of course, a note of doom is embedded in the title of this domestic tragedy by Eugene O'Neill.
While ITN correspondents deliver their reports fairly straight, the BBC's aim more for operatic notes of tragedy (Keane) and comedy (Peston).
