For Chopin’s contemporaries this was one of his greatest efforts.  Heller wrote:  “It engenders the sweetest sadness, the most enviable torments, and if in playing it one feels oneself insensibly drawn toward mournful and melancholy ideas, it is a disposition of the soul which I prefer to all others.  Alas! how I love these sombre and mysterious dreams, and Chopin is the god who creates them.”  In this etude Kleczynski thinks there are traces of weariness of life, and quotes Orlowski, Chopin’s friend,” He is only afflicted with homesickness.”  Willeby calls this study the most beautiful of them all.  For me it is both morbid and elegiac.  There is nostalgia in it, the nostalgia of a sick, lacerated soul.  It contains in solution all the most objectionable and most endearing qualities of the master.  Perhaps we have heard its sweet, highly perfumed measures too often.  Its interpretation is a matter of taste.  Kullak has written the most ambitious programme for it.  Here is a quotation from Albert R. Parsons’ translation in Schirmer’s edition of Kullak.

Throughout the entire piece an elegiac mood prevails.  The composer paints with psychologic truthfulness a fragment out of the life of a deeply clouded soul.  He lets a broken heart, filled with grief, proclaim its sorrow in a language of pain which is incapable of being misunderstood.  The heart has lost—­ not something, but everything.  The tones, however, do not always bear the impress of a quiet, melancholy resignation.  More passionate impulses awaken, and the still plaint becomes a complaint against cruel fate.  It seeks the conflict, and tries through force of will to burst the fetters of pain, or at least to alleviate it through absorption in a happy past.  But in vain!  The heart has not lost something—­it has lost everything.  The musical poem divides into three, or if one views the little episode in B major as a special part, into four parts (strophes), of which the last is an elaborated repetition of the first with a brief closing part appended.  The whole piece is a song, or, better still, an aria, in which two principal voices are to be brought out; the upper one is in imitation of a human voice, while the lower one must bear the character throughout of an obligato violoncello.  It is well known that Chopin was very fond of the violoncello and that in his piano compositions he imitated the style of passages peculiar to that instrument.  The two voices correspond closely, supplementing and imitating each other reciprocally.  Between the two a third element exists:  an accompaniment of eighths in uniform succession without any significance beyond that of filling out the harmony.  This third element is to be kept wholly subordinate.  The little, one-voiced introduction in recitative style which precedes the aria reminds one vividly of the beginning of the Ballade in G minor, op. 23.

The D flat study, No. 8, is called by Von Bulow “the most useful exercise in the whole range of etude literature.