Frédéric Chopin  

"Stanislaw Przybyszewski in his "Zur Psychologie des Individuums" approaches the morbid Chopin—the Chopin who threw open to the world the East, who waved his chromatic wand to Liszt, Tschaikowsky, Saint-Saens, Goldmark, Rubinstein, Richard Strauss, Dvorak and all Russia with its consonantal composers. This Polish psychologist—a fulgurant expounder of Nietzsche—finds in Chopin faith and mania, the true stigma of the mad individualist, the individual "who in the first instance is naught but an oxidation apparatus." Nietzsche and Chopin are the most outspoken individualities of the age—he forgets Wagner—Chopin himself the finest flowering of a morbid and rare culture. His music is a series of psychoses—he has the sehnsucht of a marvellously constituted nature—and the shrill dissonance of his nerves, as seen in the physiological outbursts of the B minor Scherzo, is the agony of a tortured soul. The piece is Chopin's Iliad; in it are the ghosts that lurk near the hidden alleys of the soul, but here come out to leer and exult." --Chopin: The Man and His Music, James Huneker