Crushing

For us today, perhaps the most crushing, anguish- and sense-of-loss-provoking declaration in the entire history of music is this by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during the last days of his final illness (reported by Constanze Mozart, his wife, to his biographer, Georg Nikolaus Nissen, Constanze's second husband):

And just now I must die when I could live quietly. Now to leave my art just as I had freed myself from the slavery of fashion, no longer chained by speculators, and could follow my own flights of inspiration and compose freely and independently whatever my heart dictates!