Today’s episode is brought to you by the International Talk Like a Pirate Day advocacy board.

Arrrg! Avast, ye landlubbers, and harken to me tale. The seas be wild, they be, and only the sturdiest sea-legs be worthy of a ship as fine as the Flying Dutchman. What be the Flying Dutchman, ye ask? Shiver me timbers, I ne’er known a landlubber such as ye, what never heard of the Dutchman. ‘Tis a ghost ship, doomed to sail the seven seas, and her ghost captain is bound to this fate forever, unless – ah, ye guessed it – a fair wench did declare love for him. You see, us pirates be romantic folk – we love the battle between life and death, damnation and salvation, and the redemption that only true love can give ye. Wot? Ye don’t believe me, do ye? Well, a pox on you and your damned landlubbering gollymangers, and may ye be caught in the storm like the one that inspired old Dicky Wagner to compose this overture, and may it bring ye to Davy Jone’s locker, or worse yet, bring ye aboard the accursed Flying Dutchman herself.

If it tickle ye barnacles, I must mention that this recording be the finest I’ve heard – the inner parts do not get obscured in a sea of messy writing. Ye can hear every note clearly. May your sailing skies be as clear and clean as these.

As an organist, and a masochist, I love the music of Max Reger – he penned one of my favorite organ works. His music is often so complex and busy that it was said that, instead of writing black notes on white paper, he would start with black paper and just while out the parts without notes.

In the realm of composers, though, he’s probably on the C-list, so many people haven’t heard of him unless you’ve encountered his music – and if you have, you either love it or hate it. Consequentially, there are some truly scathing famous criticisms of Reger’s music (all taken here from Nicolas Slonimsky‘s Lexicon of Musical Invective):

“This Reger is a sarcastic, churlish fellow, bitter and pedantic and rude. He is a sort of musical Cyclops, a strong, ugly creature bulging with knotty and unshapely muscles, an ogre of composition. In listening to these works … one is perforce reminded of the photograph of Reger … that shows something that is like a swollen, myopic beetle with thick lips and sullen expression, crouching on an organ-bench. There is something repulsive as well as pedantic in this art. His works … are like mathematical problems and solutions, sheer brain-spun and unlyrical.” – Paul Rosenfeld, Musical Portraits

“Reger’s [String] Quartet … looks like music, it sounds like music, it might even taste like music; yet it remains, stubbornly, not music. … Reger might be epitomized as a composer whose name is the same either forward or backward, and whose music, curiously, often displays the same characteristic.” – Irving Kolodin, New York Sun

“[Reger’s ‘100th Psalm’] is enough to split the roof of the theater with the skull of the audience.” – Pall Mall Gazette

Reger, however, had the last laugh, with this popular quote which he sent to one of his critics:

“I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me!”

François Couperin wrote approximately ten bazillion short pieces for harpsichord. Okay, not really; but he wrote enough that if you were to listen to them all in a row, it would take well over 10 hours.***

Most baroque composers gave their keyboard compositions boring titles that merely told you the tempo or what kind of dance they were: titles like “Suite” or “Minuet” or “Allegro.” Couperin gave many of his works names that evoke a scene, mood, or idea – a full 100+ years before programmatic music became all the rage. And to boot, he actually wrote the book on keyboard playing.

One of his short harpsichord pieces is titled “The Mysterious Barricade.” People have interpreted this title to mean a number of different things: the barricade between life and death; the barricade between past, present, and future; and the barricade that underwear provides.

***If you’re up for that Couperin marathon, start here, with book I, then continue through volume IV. And bring popcorn. A LOT of popcorn.