Peter Schickele
Impish musical parodist who ‘discovered’ PDQ Bach, history’s ‘most justifiably neglected’ composer
PETER SCHICKELE, who has died aged 88, was better known as the fictional composer PDQ Bach, whose Victor Borge-style parodies delighted audiences; he was equally inventive with instruments, coming up with a trombonebassoon combination known as the tromboon, and the left-handed sewer flute.
A grizzly-bearded, Brahms-like figure, Schickele looked like a refugee from a psychedelic 1960s rock band. He claimed to be head of musical pathology at the (nonexistent) University of Southern North Dakota in Hoople, where he was engaged in excavating the work of PDQ Bach, “history’s most justifiably neglected composer”.
His creation took on a life of its own, with a back story that cast a wickedly irreverent eye over the more pretentious aspects of musical scholarship. PDQ Bach (born 1807, died 1742) was the “last and least talented” of Johann Sebastian’s 20 sons, credited with composing anything traditional musicologists love to unearth in dusty archives: oratorios, cantatas, motets and madrigals.
“The first manuscript I discovered was being used as a strainer in a coffee maker in Southern Bavaria,” Schickele told the
Evening Standard. “That was in 1954 and I had no idea then that I would devote so much of my life to PDQ.”
In the course of his “research” Schickele came upon such masterpieces as PDQ Bach’s Missa Hilarious, the dramatic oratorio Oedipus Tex and Eine Kleine Nichtmusik, in which Mozart’s famous serenade is overlaid with snatches from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Stravinsky’s Petrushka.
Schickele fiercely denied having a hand in their creation, insisting that they had all been found in dustbins, attics and the like. The composer’s other works included the
1712 Overture, a seasonal tribute to a New Jersey municipality called O Little Town of Hackensack, and The Short-tempered Clavier (Preludes and Fugues in All the Major and Minor Keys Except for the Really Hard Ones, S 3.14159).
Opera made an appearance in the form of
The Abduction of Figaro, The Civilian Barber
Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice, described as “an opera in one unnatural act”. was not easily forgotten by its victims, nor was the “Canine Cantata”
In P D Q Bach, Schickele created a character that was at once richly comic and brilliantly plausible. Like Gerard Hoffnung and Fritz Spiegl in Britain, much of his humour relied on wrong notes and unusual juxtapositions. But by remaining close to the truth, his ingeniously orchestrated hoaxes were both pointed and entertaining, with the music deriving its satirical edge from the creator’s comprehensive knowledge of the appropriate idioms.
In November 1983 Schickele appeared at the Barbican in London, sliding down a rope. He landed in the midst of the orchestra during the final moments of PDQ’S Concerto
at which point the piano stool exploded under him. The slapstick humour continued with built-in misunderstandings between conductor and orchestra, including the Schleptet with its lingering Yehudi Menuetto movement.
Eventually, concert organisers included P D Q parodies as part of their regular programmes, while Schickele was heard on Radio 3 discussing the role of humour in music. PDQ Bach, he insisted, had something to say to the modern psyche: “When you hear the music of Mozart and JS Bach you feel a bit inferior because you know you can never create anything that beautiful. Whereas with PDQ you feel you could easily do that with one ear tied behind your back.”
Johann Peter Schickele was born in Ames, Iowa, on July 17 1935, the elder of two sons of Rainer Schickele, a German immigrant and agricultural economist, and his wife Elizabeth (née Wilcox), a science teacher. After the war the family settled in Fargo, North Dakota, where he studied the piano and played bassoon in the local orchestra.
His brother David, who became a film-maker, shared his interest in musical parody. In 1953 the pair made a home recording with a cellist friend of the Sanka
a parody of Bach père’s Coffee
which they credited to the black sheep of the family, PDQ. Influenced by the American musical comedian Spike Jones, they formed a comic band called Jerky Jems and his Balmy Brothers.
Schickele studied music at Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia, and took private classes with the composers Roy Harris and Darius Milhaud. Moving on to the Juilliard School, New York, his classmates included Philip Glass, whose work he parodied in Einstein on the Fritz, a rare deviation from PDQ Bach’s traditional Baroque milieu.
By the mid-1960s he was making musical arrangements for the folk singer Joan Baez, later writing and performing music for Kenneth Tynan’s risqué revue Oh! Calcutta!
(1969). By then he had returned to teach at Juilliard, where he presented occasional humorous concerts with the conductor Jorge Mester which soon became annual affairs open to the public.
The PDQ Bach recordings won four Grammy awards, while Schickele won a fifth for the crossover album Hornsmoke (1998). He wrote more than 100 works in his own name, although the serious composer was invariably overshadowed by his alter ego.
In 1962 Peter Schickele married the poet Susan Sindall. She survives him with their son and daughter.