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Huneker, James, 1860-1921

"Chopin : the Man and His Music"

For this he reproved Schubert. Such
intensity cannot be purchased but at the cost of breadth, of
sanity, and his picture of life is not so high, wide, sublime, or
awful as Beethoven's. Yet is it just as inevitable, sincere and
as tragically poignant.
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.


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