Celebrating Peter Schickele, the Musical Satirist Behind P.D.Q. Bach

P.D.Q. Bach shares a birthday with Sergei Rachmaninoff, April 1. For one of those composers, the April Fool’s joke was intentional.

Peter Schickele, who died Tuesday at the age of 88, “discovered” the works of the “last and least” of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sons, whose dates are given as “1807-1742?” Schickele would produce concerts of the ersatz Bach’s works, presiding over them as a shambolic musicologist, conducting clever parodies of 18th century music and weaving picaresque tales of the composer’s life.

It’s amazing to contemplate how successful he was; these concerts consistently sold out major concert halls for exactly fifty years (as it happened, the P.D.Q. Bach Golden Anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall in 2015 was his last). In comedic terms, he was the missing link between Victor Borge and “Weird Al” Yankovic, and just as Yankovic has become as famous as many of the artists he parodied, it’s very likely that P.D.Q. Bach has sold more albums than any of J.S. Bach’s non-fictional sons. In fact, while no album of works devoted to any of those sons has won a single Grammy, P.D.Q. Bach’s albums won four of them. (To be clear, 18 Grammys have been awarded to albums devoted to Johann Sebastian Bach, or, as Schickele sometimes referred to him, “Big Daddy” Bach.)

Peter Schickele was, of course, the composer of these works and the creator of the PDQ persona. He was a Juilliard-educated bassoonist, pianist, conductor, composer and arranger, who enjoyed an admirable career including a fifth Grammy for an album of non-comic works under his own name. He composed scores for Hollywood and Broadway and did the arrangements for three Joan Baez albums. Like Leonard Bernstein, he not only delighted in switching milieus and genres, but was making a statement by doing so: that the language of music resists being segregated, just as the flora, fauna and tectonic foundation of a piece of land is not going to cooperate with a border humans construct to divide it. 

Schickele taught at Juilliard but he also taught through his work. Listening to P.D.Q. Bach albums was part of my musical education: hearing his parodies of 18th century music at the same time that I was educating myself about it (and developing a particular attachment to Mozart ) helped me identify its characteristics. He often drew attention to the use of repetition in this period. One of his frequent jokes was taking a sequence, following it through in the manner of composers of that era, and then keeping it going to the point of absurdity. This helped me develop an instinct for why composers used repetition, its legitimate purpose in transfixing listeners just enough to take them by the hand through their musical journey, and the extent to which predictability is a welcome anchor. In the guise of his alter ego, Schickele demonstrates the point when repetition becomes annoying, and the point when it becomes funny. Schickele was playing a dangerous game and he won every time, because his sense of comic timing was as acute as Vivaldi’s sense of just how many arpeggios we need to cycle through before we get to, um, the next set of arpeggios. It’s fitting that one of Schickele's lifelong friends was his Juilliard classmate Philip Glass, who also knew a thing or two or three about repetition, and who laughed along with everyone else at his friend’s tribute composition Einstein on the Fritz. (One of Glass’s seminal compositions was Einstein on the Beach.)

That’s just one of many of Schickele’s jokes that may need to be explained for today’s audience. If you don’t understand the humor in the titles “Concerto for Horn and Hardart” or “Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice” that old guy doing the N.Y. Times crossword in pen at your local Dunkin will be happy to explain it to you if you’ve got the afternoon free; suffice to say that they’re examples of Schickele’s engaging with the present day world and popular culture like any other comedian. But as a classical music fan you might have an easier time identifying the references in the “Unbegun Symphony”, “The Short-Tempered Clavier”,” Iphigenia in Brooklyn”, or the use of a singing dog or “houndentenor” in the cantata “Wachet Arf” and the opera “Fido and Aeneas.” It’s comforting to know that Schickele lived long enough to witness society’s re-embrace of bad puns and dad jokes.

Schickele was also a pioneer in radio. His program Schickele Mix began life as a syndicated public radio program but it was really a podcast before the word was invented. It has held up remarkably well and is much better suited for the internet, since its explorations of musical forms across genres doesn’t fit comfortably into the narrow formats of terrestrial radio. For example, his program on canons includes not only works by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, but also a selection from Guys and Dolls, some Russian folk music, stories from his childhood, and live performances of his own compositions on a Casio keyboard. Its tagline is a quote from Duke Ellington: “if it sounds good, it is good.”

But radio always seemed to be his natural habitat. Several P.D.Q. Bach albums are structured like radio programs, complete with theme music, weather reports, commercials, and studio mishaps. If you’ve never heard his work, I strongly suggest starting with his early albums “P.D.Q. Bach On The Air”, which includes such classics as the Schleptet and a broadcast of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth with sports-like color commentary, and my personal favorite “The Stoned Guest”, a parody of Mozart’s Don Giovanni within a parody of a Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcast (complete with a quiz at intermission) capped off by two parodies of Elizabethan madrigals.

Schickele was not the first to find the humor in the conventions of 18th century music. There are ample clues that people at the time were well aware of the excessive formal rigor of the era’s musical rhetoric, especially in contrast to the considerably more freewheeling music of the previous century. Mozart did his own Schickele-like exercise in A Musical Joke, which happened to be the first piece he wrote after hearing of his father’s death, perhaps as a tribute to their shared sense of humor and constant drive to test the boundaries of classical form. Sixty years earlier, A Beggar’s Opera punctured the conventions of Italian opera so mercilessly that Handel’s company was put out of business and he was forced to make a major mid-career switch to English oratorio. Johann Mattheson, a composer and theorist, published an essay in 1725 making fun of the way J.S. Bach repeated words and phrases, citing this example in Cantata 21: “I, I, I, I had much grief, I had much grief, in my heart, in my heart.” It’s funny because it’s true, but of course all this mocking was also a way of marveling: this is so silly it shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Handel’s operas have never been more popular than they are now, Bach’s settings of religious texts have moved people deeply on both an aesthetic and spiritual level since Mendelssohn re-introduced them to us nearly two centuries ago, and the formal rigor of sonata form hasn’t stemmed the ongoing popularity of Mozart and Haydn. It’s doesn’t seem like a coincidence that P.D.Q. Bach’s career rose parallel to the steadily increasing number of recordings and performances of 18th century music since the 1960s. Humor wisely used has the ability to relax us and make us more receptive to that which is unfamiliar or daunting. Peter Schickele was there for us when the culture needed him, to help us find the humor and marvel not only in the seemingly rigid art of the past but to keep our ears open to the music and technology of the future - while still being our sloppy, nerdy selves who never stopped laughing at bad puns.