P D Q Bach, RIP
RIPThe American composer Peter Schickele, famed for his best-selling Bach parodies, has died at his home, near Woodstock, aged 88.
Aside from ‘discovering’ works by the lesser-known Bach progeny, he composed more than 100 works for orchestra, as well as arrangements for Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie. He was best friends at Juilliard with Philip Glass.
P D Q stood for pretty damn quick.
Allan Kozinn writes: ‘Peter Schickele’s humor was special – getting all the jokes required a certain degree of musical literacy, but even if you missed the arcane stuff, his shows were a lot of fun. He was also a genuinely nice guy. And there was his serious/non-comic work, which I liked a lot as well.’
Obit here.
His ‘Schickele Mix’ PRI program was entertaining and far-reaching. An antecedent to PDQ was his Woodstock area neighbor Alan Shulman’s New Friends of Rhythm. RIP PDQ/Peter who ended every program with Duke Ellington’s quote,
“If it sounds good, it is good.”
And: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that certain je ne sais quoi.”
Peter was a very respected composer and yet, his comedic brilliance as P.D.Q. Bach gave him joy and gave his adoring fans something fun to look forward to in every performance and the nod recorded legacy. The ink is still wet from his last magnum opus, the “Concerto for Simply Grand Piano and Orchestra, S.99%”! I hope he is finally meeting the father he never knew, J.S.! Seriously, though, Pete was a great person, a generous person, having worn both hats successfully. Our last time together was in Fargo, North Dakota, where he had spent teenage years. He attended the performance of the Simply Grand Concerto and was able to enjoy a post-concert schmooze. We shall miss you, but can always return to you through your videos and audio recordings and memories.
Ah, PDQ Bach
Schickele also wrote the wonderful soundtrack and theme song (hauntingly performed by Joan Baez) for Silent Running (1972).
RIP indeed
The creator of the Lasso d’amore, the left handed sewer flute, and the tromboon has left a wonderful legacy. Saw him in Philly in 1980, will never forget it. His humor wouldn’t survive 5 minutes today. Long live P.D.Q.!
His humor was pointedly aimed at the “knowledgeable ” and “misinformed”. I include my best friends amongst that! RIP and remember Bobby Corno!
Thanks for many decades of great fun. I just played Schickele’s “Safe Sextet” last week and had a ball with it. With his passing, the era of great classical comedians is over. Anna Russell, Victor Borge and PDQ Bach; there will never be any like them again. I’m glad I got to see Schickele in concert several times. RIP.
Agreed, these legends will never be replaced. But there are some wonderful reasons to hope that classical humor as a genre will continue. Igudesmann & Joo, for example.
A legend. I fondly recall several PDQ appearances in Seattle in the late 1970s. Behind the parody was great musical sophistication and his “Schickele Mix” program was wonderful; unfortunately due to music rights issues those episodes are no longer available.
They can be streamed here: https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/schickele-mix-if-it-sounds-good-it-is-good/2368995
Thank You!!
Recently, I played some of his of music for a group of kids and they all loved it! They dubbed it the “Symphony of Many Farts.”
RIP
He was brilliant. Sad to say that if he was starting out today, PDQ Bach would probably have been a failure. There simply aren’t enough classical music lovers out there anymore who would get the jokes.
Years ago I took part in a performance of “The Seasonings” (my first and only outing as a hosepiper). The oratorio was the final work on a concert by a community college choir in what I would objectively call a small, conservative town. There wasn’t a SINGLE laugh during the entire performance; the audience reacted with stoney faces throughout, even to some of the slapstick shtick we were doing.
Igudesman & Joo prove that classical music humor sells out concert halls just fine in this day and age as well.
Very sad to hear. An absolute genius who had an amazing wit. But he was much more than just PDQ, he was also an amazing composer who had real craft, an amazing ear, and a thorough mastery of many musical genres. The overture to his “Abduction of Figaro” is a little gem of musical humor, finding a way to go almost seamlessly from Mozart to music reminiscent of TV series from the 60s or 70s. Although he could have focused on becoming merely a “serious” composer, I suspect he had too much irony, detachment, and longing for freedom to submit to the many strictures of institutionalized music-making. In this sense, he remained faithful to himself, sometimes parodying himself as a faculty member of the fictional University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2Hc5F4hJ60
Looked at this video yesterday evening. Tears ..from laugh were running on my cheeks. Brilliant humour with very smart composition technique. I played once a piece by him to an unexpecting audience. So funny to see them doubting: is it serious? to go finally into laugh and pleasure. Thanks mister Schickele for all those brilliant pieces. Heaven is for sure now a more funny place. RIP
P D Q still stands for pretty damn quick.
We should mention too:
–the opera “The Stoned Guest” (1970)
–his oratorio “The Seasonings” (1971)
–No-No Nonette for assorted winds and toys (1977)
–A Little Nightmare Music (1982) and
–The Abduction of Figaro (1984)
If just one PDQ work survived it would have to be Iphigenia in Brooklyn!
I agree!! In 1983, I was sharing a one bedroom apartment in the Ansonia building on Broadway, final year at Juilliard. Three others shared the rent. LOL! It was $1000 a month, so we each paid $250! two per room. In that building lived John Ferrante – the same John who was PDQ’s ‘bargain-counter tenor’! We would meet up at the lobby by chance on many occasions, and he was just a hoot. He made ‘Iphigenia in Brooklyn’ a legacy recording on that ‘Concerto for Horn & Hardart’ recording. (Does anyone today know that the Horn & Hardart was an automat to buy food? What’s an automat?? Then, Peter turned the ‘Hardart’ into an instrument that would have delighted all the Who’s in Whoville!
I absolutely agree! The chord that ushers in “Oh, ye gods!” is my single favorite moment in all of P.D.Q. Bach.
That chord!!!!
I hadn’t heard this for years but re-listened now. Thanks for the reminder! There’s also a fun cataclysmic chord in the Toccata and Fuga Obnoxia (Little Pickle Book) for theatre organ on the Short Tempered Clavier CD.
I had the privilege of watching him arrive at a New Years Eve concert at Carnegie Hall [late, as always] by swinging down to the stage on a rope from a box on the first balcony. An unforgettable musical experience!
I was once driving down the street while my local classical station [the wonderful WXXI in Rochester, NY] played PDQ’s “A Bach Portrait”. In this work, shamelessly plagiarized from Copland, a narrator [i.e., Schickele] reads JS Bach’s increasingly irritated letters to his employers about his salary and working conditions, over a background of seamlessly merged Bach and Copland. By the time I reached my destination, I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t leave the car, and a passer-by stopped to ask whether I was OK, because I was crying so hard.
I first heard of PDQ Bach from my father, who was not at all interested in classical music. He happened to switch the car radio on just as PDQ’s Beethoven 5 started. He had to pull the car over, he could not drive for laughing so hard.
Having had the unimaginable good fortune to have grown-up in NYC in the 1960s/1970s, there were three events that I looked forward to every year:
Caballé’s Carnegie Hall recital – highlight: “We left the music at the airport” – entire concert improvised
Anna Russell – highlight: leading a Carnegie Hall audience in a chorus from “Nabucco” to which she had written the text which began “Oh Shadrach and Meshach”
The P.D.Q. Bach concert – among the many highlights:
Audience at Town Hall getting nervous as the orchestra was seated and tuned-up and it was now 20:05; a stage manager took a microphone and apologised for the delay stating “We don’t know where he is”. As he said these words, we were aware of sirens outside the hall, not uncommon in NYC, but then they clearly stopped at the hall. The back doors to the auditorium burst open and a crew of men in white coats led Schickele, in a straitjacket, down the aisle, up onstage, and to the podium. They removed the straitjacket to reveal Schickele in tails who, without further ado, picked-up the baton and gave the downbeat.
At another Town Hall concert, Schickele entered from the rear of the balcony, ran to the edge, unfurled a rope ladder, climbed down, ran to the stage, and picked-up the baton.
I must confess to not being familiar with Schickele’s music (note to self: listen to some!), but the works P.D.Q. Bach left behind – “Concert for Horn and Hardart”, the oratorio “The Seasonings”, the operas “The Abduction of Figaro”, “Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice”, and “The Stoned Guest”, “The Short-Tempered Clavier”, the cantata “Iphigenia in Brooklyn” with its haunting recitative “No one knows what it is to be running, only he who is running, running, running knows” followed by the virtuoso coloratura aria “Running knows” – there will never again be a light as bright as that which he shared with us for so many decades.
Afterthought: if you browse through the index of the biography of P.D.Q. Bach, the entry for “Scylla” says “see Charybdis”; the entry for “Charybdis” says “see Scylla”.
Anna Russell… I heard wondrous tales from her husband.
We need to know.
I know, of course, that this is a tribute to the extraordinary Peter Schickele, but I’m happy to see your mention of Anna Russell and her “version” of Nabucco. I can still remember her concert in Houston at Jones Hall where my Glyndebourne and Houston Grand colleague and friend, Jean Mallandaine, and I were laughing so hard while singing along to “Oh Shadrach, Meshach and Abendigo” that we had tears rolling down our cheeks.
That bit of audience participation was topped only by a three part round of “Susanna’s a Funny Old Man” led again by Miss Russell from the stage. The memories of Houston ladies in their furs, snorting and “hee-hawing” in canon form, will never leave me. Thank God!!
R. I. P. both PDQ and Anna. Thank you both for what you gave us. I’m so, so grateful to have been of your generation.
Some of my favorite memories are from the evening the two of them shared one year at what was then NY Philharmonic Hall.
My friends and I spotted him in a local hangout after a PDQ Bach concert which we attended, so we sent him a pitcher of beer–which he came over and shared. Wonderfully funny offstage too.
My favorite PDQ Bach discoveries: No-No Nonette (that dates me), Desecration of the House Overture, and The Abduction of Figaro. Plus his music for tromboon. I could go on….
You just made me recall “The Preachers of Crimetheus”.
‘Peter Schickele was pure joy. A fine composer and a wonderful comedian and a proud member of the bassoon community! Sadly his type of humor (like the great Anna Russel) would no longer sell in a dumbed down culture where most college graduates could not differentiate Bach from Stravinsky much less even know what a bassoon is. RIP Professor!
Honestly, there weren’t that many then who could, or would care.
I stopped in once at the Hoople Bar in the late 1970’s…(which, by the way, is in northern, NOT southern North Dakota….) No one present had ever heard of the fabulous “Report From Hoople.” In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Hilarious stuff! I saw him one time. It was a Carnegie Hall performance ca.1970 when he entered swinging down on a rope from the balcony, shouting “Bach power”. I still have his book on PDQ.
My older brother and I grew up laughing our heads off to the LP collections of P.D.Q. Bach’s music. Later in my twenties and thirties I got to know the maniacal creator of that ersatz artistry, composer Peter Schickele, and I played some of his authentic music for him, too. In 1996 we were two of ten pianists performing monster arrangements at the Kennedy Center Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Gala Concert in Washington DC, and on that occasion, as at every meeting I ever had with Peter, he told jokes with the deft timing and sardonic brilliance of a master wit. Most treasured of all in memory now, is the card Peter sent to me shortly after my very public gender transition. Upon it, he wrote simply, “You Go, Girl.”
Like Mark Twain, Peter Schickele knew the right word for the right moment. He was a great American creative genius in the mold of Will Rogers, Jack Benny, or his own personal muse Spike Jones. RIP dear Peter, you served music at the highest level and brought smiles to millions in the process. Who could ask for anything more.
For several years in a row in my youth I went to one of his Xmas concerts at Carnegie. The hall was always full and so was the fun. For his genre he stands on the same cloud in heaven with Borge.
I cut my teeth on those PDQ Bach LPs from the 1970s, which my local library conveniently filed right alongside those by JS Bach. So I got my Bach education all at once, you might say.
I shall play “My Bonny Lass, She Smelleth” in his memory today.
Let’s see how much I can recall from the top of my head:
My bonnie lass, she smelleth
Making the flowers jealouth,
My bonnie lass would be nice,
Yeah, even at twice the price …
I think this is from “The Triumphs of Thusnelda” which also includes “The Queen to Me a Royal Pain Doth Give”.
The famous opera American conductor and Berlioz expert, John Nelson, sang in of the these madrigals.
It is also interesting to note that Peter’s grandfather René Schickele, was a renowned Alsatian expressionist poet (1883-1940). Unfortunately, his works were shunned by the Kaiser and burned by the Nazis.
BTW, there are René Schickele streets everywhere in Alsace–there’s even one next to the Parliament!
If there ever was a moment for hundreds of comments, this is it. We had some brief professional connections and more than 4 decades of collisions all filled with laughter. And lots of music for us to discover and treasure. RIP dear Peter.
Worth looking up a book which was a parody of The New Yorker magazine produced sometime in the 1980’s I think, in which Shickele contributed an dead-on parody of Andrew Porter’s music criticism (I think the parody name was Wanerd Torpor or some such.) Among other things he averred that the only great composers ever were Verdi and Elliot Carter, which is just about exactly what reading Porter felt like…
My cousin, Fransciska Koscielny was his Concert Mistress for one tour, and related how hard it was to keep a straight face when he entered the stage on a rope guided by a rope-pulley from the balcony.
As to comments made about whether he would be considered funny to audiences of today, I think he would, even to non-classical music afficiandos. It was the
timing which made him so funny, plus the strange sounds of his invented instruments: the vacuum cleaner, for one.
He poked fun at the pretentiousness of classical music audiences, and that would appeal to those who aren’t part of that demographic, just as it did so many years ago.
I count, as well, recordings by Anna Russell and Florence (forgot-her-last-name) wealthy woman who hired Carnegie Hall to sing with her wretched voice. Not intended to be funny, she took herself seriously.
Musicians are, as a whole, people with terrific senses of humor. It’s the timing which makes things so funny, and the unexpected. For my money, musicians are generally, the best people in the world! The worst, critics who know nothing about music.
Florence Foster Jenkins.
I got to work with Prof. Schickele in 2007, and was delighted to find that he was as kind and gracious offstage as he was funny on. I mentioned that I had been at his Los Angeles debut at Hollywood Bowl in 1965, and he shared a delightful behind-the-scenes story about it — too long to recount here, but proof positive that he went to any length to delight his audience and give them the precious gift of laughter. Adieu, dear Professor Schickele. Adieu, P. D. Q. You’ll both be sorely missed.
I particularly likeed his piercing of the balloon of pomposity that afflicts the classical music realm. Thank you, P.S. and RIP.
Besides agreeing with pretty much everything that is being said – at least so far – about Peter Schickele in the comments above here, I would like to add only that as someone who was lucky to perform with him several times in PDQ programs during 1980s and 1990s, I was always impressed, in addition to his unique combination of musical and humorous genius, by his genuinely generous attitude toward others often expressed by his readiness and willingness to (belly)laugh out loud in response to other people’s jokes, even though many of them were usually of rather inferior quality compared to those that came from his own highly talented mind. One of my favorite of his numbers that was not mentioned here yet is his version of the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that was greatly “enhanced” by his play-by-play sporting commentary – it was absolutely hilarious and the timing of it was delightfully precise.
He is survived by his wife, Betty Sue Bach.
I had the pleasure of seeing a PDQ Bach performance at the Kennedy Center. His radio program was super, explaining musical concepts in easily understandable terms – like playing the Everly Brother’s “Cathy’s Clown” to demonstrate march tempo.
Do I remember correctly that he wrote a piece for Viola Four Hands? All the above comments remind me of my youth, thank you for the laughs.
He once ran a contest, on his radio broadcast from the Music Department of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, for which the grand prize was the complete works of Vivaldi, on 45 RPM singles, one a week, for the rest of your life. The consolation prize, for losers, was a set of the Beethoven symphonies conducted by Toscanini, on LP.
I believe the prize was “the complete works of Giuseppe Torelli on handy 45 rpm records.”
Going bach(sic) a little further–and showing my age — there was SpikeJones. Who had to reduce his parodied to fit on 10″ 78rpm shellac discs
He was a gifted musician.
I saw one of his concerts decades ago in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. They did the schtick about not knowing where he was, and he came running down the aisle in an ill-fitting black tuxedo with, as I recall, white Sneakers, and belly-flopped up onto the stage. There was also a bright green bit of thread stuck to his back which was glaringly obvious as he turned to conduct the orchestra.
He had a very broad appeal, not just to those who knew something about classical music. My social media feeds the last couple of days have been full of posts about his death from people that, as far as I knew, were not especially conversant with classical works. Most of them, like many of the commenters here, were recalling some of his best bits. RIP.
He also had a great radio voice. Sounded a lot like Stan Freberg. His show was fun to listen to.
I saw him “in person” only once, many years ago at Cincinnati Music Hall. I’ve rarely laughed so hard in my entire life. Stomach muscles aching, tears streaming off my face.
I love many of the conventions of classical music composition and performance, and I love the way he made obviously affectionate fun of them. As he proved, these loves are not mutually exclusive.
I remember the 1712 Overture. There was also the wonderful stage manager Walter Bruno who had a penchant for knocking over music stands.
I very much enjoyed the many PDQ Bach albums and I got to play Tromboon in the “The Seasonings” under his direction when he did a concert with our college orchestra, about 1981 or so.
I really enjoyed playing Peter Schickele’s Quartet for Clarinet, Violoncello, Violin, and Piano, and his PDQ Bach was hilarious!!
I got to see him at Carnegie Hall, of all places. He entered the stage from the balcony, swinging on a rope and knocking over chairs and music stands. I went on to become a classical music student. He reminded us that classical music could be fun.
I sang his madrigal with our concert choir in high school. I also saw him live at the Philadelphia Academy of Music and fell out of my chair laughing so hard…twice.