Peter Schickele, creator of P.D.Q. Bach
Peter Schickele, an American composer whose career as a writer of serious concert music was often eclipsed by that of his antic alter ego, the thoroughly debauched, terrifyingly prolific, and mercifully fictional P.D.Q. Bach, died Tuesday at his home in Bearsville, a hamlet outside Woodstock, N.Y. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Karla Schickele. His health had declined after a series of infections last fall, she said.
Under his own name, Mr. Schickele (pronounced SHICKuh-lee) composed more than 100 symphonic, choral, solo instrumental, and chamber works, first heard on concert stages in the 1950s and later commissioned by some of the world’s leading orchestras, soloists, and chamber ensembles. He also wrote film scores and musical numbers for Broadway.
His music was performed by the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Lark Quartet, the Minnesota Opera, and other notable ensembles, as well as by folk singers Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie, for whom he wrote arrangements.
But to his resigned chagrin, it was as a musical parodist in the tradition of Victor Borge, Anna Russell, and Spike Jones — Mr. Schickele’s particular idol — that he remained best known.
For more than a half-century, through live performances seemingly born of the marriage of Mozart, the Marx Brothers, and Rube Goldberg; prizewinning recordings; and even a book-length biography, P.D.Q. Bach remained enduringly, fiendishly alive.
Leaping from Mr. Schickele’s pen in P.D.Q.’s name were compositions like the “No-No Nonette,” the cantata “Iphigenia in Brooklyn,” the “Unbegun” Symphony, and “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons.”
With these and myriad other works, Mr. Schickele, who billed himself as P.D.Q.’s “discoverer,” gleefully punctured the reverent pomposity that can attend classical-music culture.
It was P.D.Q., after all, whose work won four Grammy Awards to Mr. Schickele’s one. It was P.D.Q. who packed some of New York’s foremost concert halls for decades of annual Christmastime concerts. And it was P.D.Q. who, unbidden, could rear his head insidiously at performances of Mr. Schickele’s serious music.
As Mr. Schickele could scarcely have envisioned on an April night in 1965, when, with borrowed money, he rented Town Hall in Manhattan and loosed the full-blown P.D.Q. on an unsuspecting public, he had created a genial genie who refused to go back into the bottle.
“I certainly would like my other stuff to be better known,” he said in a 1988 interview with music journalist Bruce Duffie. He added, of his doppelgänger, “I guess I would have to say I’m jealous.”
The supremely unmusical spawn of Johann Sebastian Bach — “the last and by far the least” of his 20-odd children, Mr. Schickele called him, “and certainly the oddest” — P.D.Q. was dreamed up by Mr. Schickele and friends at midcentury.
In the years that followed, Mr. Schickele made successive “discoveries” of P.D.Q. Bach manuscripts — on one occasion in a Bavarian castle, on another in New York’s East River, on at least one more in a trash can, but most often in the beersoaked basements of the taverns that were P.D.Q.’s perennial haunts.
Among them were such epochal works as “The Stoned Guest,” a half-act opera; “The Abduction of Figaro,” a fulllength opera; “Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice,” an opera “in one unnatural act”; and the Concerto for Two Pianos vs. Orchestra.
In creating P.D.Q.’s oeuvre and putting it onstage, Mr. Schickele cannily deconstructed the classical music of Mozart’s time and just as cannily reassembled it in precisely the wrong configuration.
The perversions began with the titles. Then came the instruments for which P.D.Q. wrote. Oh, there were violins and pianos, all right, but there were also such organological oddities — all playable — as the left-handed sewer flute (made of plumbing pipes); the double-reed slide music stand; the tromboon (the bastard spawn of a trombone and a bassoon); and, most deliciously for New Yorkers of a certain vintage, the Hardart — a small edifice comprising literal bells and whistles, plus a series of glass doors with sandwiches behind them.
Crucially, there was the music, which betrayed a deeply cerebral silliness that was no less silly for being cerebral. Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.
Designed to be appreciated by novices and cognoscenti alike, P.D.Q.’s music is rife with inside jokes and broken taboos: unmoored melodies that range painfully through a panoply of keys; unstable harmonies begging for resolutions that never come; variations that have nothing whatever to do with their themes.
Some critics found P.D.Q. intolerably sophomoric. But for decades, audiences ate him up, and many reviewers lauded Mr. Schickele’s joyous verbal, physical, and musical wit.
“The mad Bachian professor, though consummately gifted as a mimic, is also much more,” James R. Oestreich wrote of Mr. Schickele in The New York Times in 1992, adding, “Even his zaniest creations show independent personality and compositional integrity (of a highly perverse sort, it is true).”
All this from a comic character that Mr. Schickele expected would endure no more than a few years.
The son of Rainer Schickele, an agricultural economist, and Elizabeth (Wilcox) Schickele, a high school science teacher who worked as a mathematician for the government during the war effort, Johann Peter Schickele was born on July 17, 1935, in Ames, Iowa, and reared there, in Washington, D.C., and in Fargo, N.D. — wherever his father’s job took the family. (The elder Schickele, who had been born in Germany, was the son of noted Alsatian novelist, essayist, and dramatist René Schickele, whose work was condemned by the Nazis.)
Enraptured by acting, young Peter and his brother, David, started a theater in the basement of the family home, playing out the plots of cowboy films and radio serials. Then, when he was about 9 and visiting a record store in Washington, Peter had a transformative experience.
“They were playing a record in the store,” Mr. Schickele recalled in a 1997 interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered.” “It was a sappy love song. And being a 9-year-old, there’s nothing worse, of course. But all of a sudden, after the last note of the song, there were these two pistol shots.”
That song, he learned, was Spike Jones’ “A Serenade to a Jerk.”
“I’ve always felt that those pistol shots changed my life,” Mr. Schickele continued. “That was the beginning of it all for me.”