I consider it a sign of maturity that I no longer swear at Chopin. I have been swearing at Chopin since I was little. Back then I had all this swearing to do and no words to do it with. We didn’t stock that kind of language in my house, so all I had to work with was high-pitched squeals. A few years later I’d picked up some useful vocabulary and I swore at Chopin with it.

The problem was that I found his stuff unnecessarily difficult to read. Little kids want everything written in C major so what they see is what they get. You get over that, though, and the black keys are easier to play on. But one thing Chopin seemed to specialize in was writing things in keys that already had a superfluous number of flats and sharps in them and then spraying them with more flats and sharps like graffiti on an underpass. At that point the casual amateur pianist no longer has any idea what notes he had in mind. Sometimes just for the pure hell of it he drops in double-flats too. Eventually one fears the whole piece will slide off the bottom end of the keyboard.

All these extraneous sharps and flats are called “accidentals” because it’s so hard to believe the composer meant to do them. In Chopin’s case it always seems like he picks a key to compose in and then soon decides he didn’t mean that key at all, but a whole other one nearby. He’ll change his mind about the key signature every few measures just to keep you on your toes. Chopin was a young man when he died. No one actually says anything about murder but I don’t think it can be ruled out.

So, as a younger musician, I used to have to bushwhack through a Chopin piece I was learning by stopping three or four times per measure to work out what the hell chord he was going for. And at that pace a lot of the chords sounded wrong. They’d resolve beautifully when played up to speed but the getting-there was a mess. Learning his stuff was like jumping from boulder to boulder in a roaring stream and calling it a “stroll.”

But I’ve improved my sight-reading ability, even in my dotage, and my swearing has dwindled to the occasional tsk. Even if he presents me something in five flats, I don’t freak out anymore. I might have to saddle up and take ‘er around the ring a few times until she quits bucking, but then it’s usually a smooth ride.

So here I am, all mature and all, and it’s not like I can play everything he put out there, but I can lay waste to a respectable amount of the oeuvre. I dip into it periodically for our recital group, which meets four times a year. In January, I happened to hear a Chopin piece on the radio, and I thought: hey, that sounds like something I can learn in a couple months without breaking too much of a sweat.

I’d never heard it before. I believe, now, it is because it isn’t one of his better pieces. Still, I ordered the sheet music and had at it. Sucker is in G-flat major. That’s six flats. You can’t hardly get many more than six flats. Ehh, I thought, what’s one more flat? I’ll take the spurs to it and it’ll settle down in a few days.

What’s one more flat, I ask? I will tell you. One more flat means it contains a C-flat. And I will state for posterity that there should be no such thing as C-flat. C is stability. C is Switzerland. I have been hammering at this thing for a couple months now, and that C will not flat itself. My brain refuses to accept it. A person should believe in something, and I believe C-flat is just flat wrong.

There is a rare key signature with seven flats that is still rumored to exist in the wild. It’s C-flat major. And we already know that can’t exist.

I’m back to swearing again. Not much, not often, and nothing I ever heard from my mom, but the word “mother” is involved.