When you compare these people to the emotional Sturm und Drang over lesser things on reality TV, you do wonder if we Americans are a nation of whiners.

As a teenager he played Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in a piano duet; and he also played it when in a grip of madness in January 1889 in Turin.

No amount of button-pressing will stop it. The display clearly shows 'Minimum Volume, ' and yet the speaker crackles on with 90 decibels of eardrum-piercing sturm und drang.