More unusual was Verdi's use of humour, both lighthearted and sardonic, in a tragic context.
It's impossible to remove the tragic context from your mind, which adds a bittersweet element to the joyful nature of the songs, but I'm thankful for the great pop songs they left rather than the ones we have lost.
The tragic context in which the trading took place was so extraordinary that perhaps never before would an individual investor have spoken of the Dow as did Gordon Morlan, 65, a retired teacher in Grosse Pointe Park, Mich.: "We were concerned to see it dip 600 points.
Ms Smith said while the death of De Menezes was "tragic", the context in which it took place should not be forgotten.
Grotesque in its stupidity, tragic in its context, hilarious in its execution.
Although tragic in the context of the play, on its own this line from the last act of Macbeth suggests that Shakespeare may have come to regard aging as more than just a phase of life to be mocked or feared: "And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends..."...
"When you look at this tragic shooting in the context of the number of youth suicides in the area, it puts everything into perspective.
Roy frames tragic personal stories within the context of the greater tragedy of Indian social strictures and politics.
Her behaviour, he writes, "was part of a need to find a minimum of normality in the context of a tragic situation".
And, of course, when Cobain killed himself on April 5 , 1994 Nirvana's mythology was forever determined, and there was no way to listen to the songs removed from the context of his tragic life.
In Fragments (1970) Armah tells of a youth, Baako, who returns from the United States to his Ghanaian family and is torn between the new demands of his home and the consequent subversion of a traditional past represented by the mythic Naana, his blind grandmother, who establishes a context for the tragic story Baako is experiencing.
